


What Never Changes

by Kamato (orphan_account)



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Drugs, F/F, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Sexual Content, Slow Burn, Torture, lots and lots of drugs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-06
Updated: 2016-11-29
Packaged: 2018-08-19 19:45:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 15
Words: 58,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8222696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Kamato
Summary: A glimpse into several lives in the Commonwealth.





	1. The Irish Fury

Riding her vicious high, the woman with the defined muscles and bulging veins charged the larger man that had just climbed on stage, wielding a mahogany, polished baseball bat. Her shrill scream rang out through the theatre, and the man lifted a tire iron with a side steel blade welded to it. The woman’s swing would have crushed his skull, but instead he ducked it, bringing his makeshift axe around in a wide swing at the the same time. Her left foot struck the ground at just the same time, propelling her into a leap to the side so his swing glanced off her hip, losing the edge alignment. As her bat came around in an overhead swing, he just barely managed to spin out of the way.  
“Such excitement!” a raspy voice rang out through a loudspeaker, but it stayed at the back of her mind as she continued attempting to annihilate him. After three swings that he narrowly dodged, the redheaded woman took a couple steps back, baiting him while she gritted her teeth. His swing came tentatively.  
“Fucking gut her!” one of the men or women in the pit below the stage shouted. The woman couldn't tell the difference between sexes terribly well while fighting. “Smash his skull, Cait!” another voice shouted.  
Cait, the high woman with the red hair flying about her face, struck the wrist of the man holding the axe as she dodged out of the way of a desperate swing. His weapon went clattering to the ground and he stumbled backwards, clutching his wrist. As he turned to run for the exit to the cage, the crowd jeered. He couldn't outrun the woman's drug fuelled rampage, though, and her bat collided with the back of his skull, sending him to the ground with a crack and a whimper. He turned over, lifting his hand as the back of his scalp already ran red. The bat crushed his forearm bone and the cheers covered his agonized scream. Cait didn't stop until his head had turned into a pile of mush on the stage and her adrenaline faded a bit, though the drugs made sure a bit stayed behind.  
“... no person stop the Irish fury? Come on! Any brave souls want to test their luck after this ferocious display?” the voice came over the intercom.  
Cait’s head turned to the fascinated, dirty, and in some cases blood spattered faces of the audience in the pit. The civilised part of her, beginning to return, despised them. Rage boiled in her belly, though. She told herself that she would take it out on the poor bastard climbing in now, covered in muscles and leather armor and a rust spotted, Chinese straight sword in his hand. His ugly, beady eyes and yellow, shit eating grin justified the coming murder, at least in her mind.  
His thrust came at her belly, but when she knocked it to the side, he danced backwards. She shuddered to think what his steel would do to her blood stained, black vest and the hungry belly beneath. With a quick strike, she sent her weapon at his bare ankle. As he tried to jump backwards again, she turned it into an upswing. He showed off his nimbleness, and what should have been a testicle crushing impact turned into a glancing blow off a leather breastplate. While she recovered from her miss, he took advantage, swinging up at her chin. Cait knocked it away with a forearm to the flat of the blade, barely aware of the shallow cut appearing there. He pressed the attack and Cait managed to back step away from the cut. He committed too much to the last side swing, and she managed to bring her bat into the ribs exposed by his reliance on it.  
As he winced, Cait brought an overhand strike down, which he caught with a palm. She heard a cry of pain, and his knees weakened for a moment. Before she could take advantage of it, though, he made a swing for her ribs. Self preservation prompted her to jump backwards, just out of the range of his swing. Then, as he tried to press the attack, rage took its place, and she lunged forward, slamming her solid, wooden instrument into his wrist even as the tip of his sword cut open the upper part of her forearm. As he stumbled backwards, Cait smashed her bat into his jaw, sending teeth and blood spraying onto the stage as he collapsed.  
When he lay dead on the stage a minute later, Cait turned and sat against the cage on the edge of it, her back to the jabbering crowd in the pit of the theater. Blood rushed in her ears, turning the shouts of the crowd and the man speaking in the loudspeaker into gibberish. She felt the throbbing in the cuts on her arms, the little cuts, and felt the blood pounding its way out of them, felt it trying to do the same to the tips of her fingers and underneath her nails, felt the marrow in her teeth, even the missing, upper right canine, and a molar, and felt the blood try to tear its way out of the arteries in her thumbs and the capillaries in her nipples. Her arms latched tight around her knees, and she rocked backwards and forwards. The chain link pressed against her back through her vest and blouse.  
The blood pounding against her eardrums covered up the first gunshots, but not muffled, like the normal distant gunshots outside of the theatre. Like a buzz saw, the sound of the shots tearing from the minigun at the top of the stairs leading to the pits tore into ears of all the men and women in the pit, while the bullets themselves tore into other parts, mostly. Cait did not hear the gunfire, much, but felt the stage vibrate beneath her as the bullets slammed into it.  
After the initial, five second spray of lead, seven people of the twenty three person crowd managed to find cover among the mostly one person, ramshackle dwellings built in the theater. Some candles burned inside them, and as people vaulted through glassless windows, they pulled out old or makeshift firearms.  
Up at the top of the theater’s steps, the Power Armor wearing warrior traipsed forward, hydraulic sounds carrying through the theater as they did so. The 5 millimeter bullets shredded the wooden cover at such high velocity, and as the bloodthirsty theater patrons died, they fired their weapons. Nothing penetrated the exterior of the Power Armor. Some of the bullets scratched the blue and yellow Vault-Tec paint on it. The bringer of pain marched through the splintered wood to finish off the screaming, moaning, shitting, dying people in the theater. Cait watched the begging, and the mercilessness, from inside the cage on the stage. Some of them died by the bullet, some by the incredible physical power of the machine encased warrior.  
After crushing the last skull of a screaming woman, the warrior stomped over to in front of the stage and set down the chaingun beside them, though a box full of ammunition, attached to the gun, hung on the warrior’s back. “Who are you?” Cait asked, her affected Irish accent matching her red hair.  
A metallic female voice rang through the Power Armor’s imposing helmet. “The Vault Dweller. Blue Bitch is what a lot of the local raiders call me.” She gestured with an armored hand at the corpses surrounding her. “You can probably see why. Let’s get out of here. The stink is probably unbearable.”  
“I hadn’t noticed, actually.”  
“You on psycho?”  
“Why?”  
“Nobody fights like that, not when they’re sober. These people your friends?”  
“Hell fucking no.”  
“You just saying that because you don’t want me to kill you, too?”  
“No. I’m not here by choice.”  
“She’s here because of me,” a raspy, male voice said, coming from a man in a tanned suit walking down the theater stairs. Cait always appreciated that he wore so much, as his necrotic, Ghoul flesh threatened to make her slightly uncomfortable at times. Of course, she’d seen hundreds of rotting people without noses, but they didn’t usually talk to her. “I bought her on a contract. ‘Course, with my clientele destroyed, I don’t have much use for her, anyway.”  
“What’s your name?” the woman in the Power Armor said. “I’m Janice.”  
“Tommy.” He pointed a nearly fleshless finger at Cait, on stage. “Irish girl’s Cait. She’s made a shit ton of money for me. And while I don’t much appreciate you wiping out the crowd, it’s probably for the best. The majority of them were dicks. And the ones that weren’t were close enough.” He folded his arms and shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Anyway, now that you’ve done this shit, I’ve got a favor to ask.”  
“And that is?”  
“Take her with you.”  
“What?!” Cait shouted. “What about this gig? It’s not like we can’t get more people to watch.”  
“I want to work in honest theater, Cait. And, while you’re one hell of a killer, you’re no actor.” Tommy leaned back on his dress shoe’s heel.  
“I don’t have to take this shit! I don’t have to go with her!”  
“It’s your best option. I know who the Vault Dweller is; she owns a fledgling city. It’s a good place. It’s your best option. You go with her, maybe you’ll finally stop slinging that shit in your arm. You know, if you don’t-”  
“I’ll die. It’ll happen at some point, and-”  
“Shut it, Cait,” Tommy commanded, lifting his hand up, showing her her palm. “I own your contract. And now I’m turning it over to Janice. You do what she wants.”  
“Really?” Janice asked, disbelieving with a negative tone. “That’s how it is?”  
“Yeah. Take good care of her.”  
“Alright.”  
As Janice bent over and grabbed the handle of her minigun, still looking at the Ghoul, he lifted his hands up by his head, taking a step backwards. “Hey, now. What’re you doing? I gave you her contract.”  
“Yeah, you did.” Janice hefted her mingun. “Sadly, I’m not into the whole owning people thing. And I don’t deal with slavers.” As the barrels begun to spin, Tommy tried to say something, but Cait didn’t hear anything more than a part of a word, cut short by a burst of bullets. Blood soaked his nice, tan suit as thirty two bullets tore apart his torso over the span of a couple seconds. On the ground, Tommy sputtered for half a minute before dying, eyes staring up at the rotting, wooden ceiling. Janice and Cait both watched him as he expired.  
“You’re a cunt, Janice.”


	2. A Visit to Goodneighbor

While used to the streets of Boston being a vipers’ nest of Super Mutants, Ghouls, rogue robots, and murderous humans, Cait found that walking next to a seven and a half foot tall suit of Power Armor meant that they would avoid you. It made sense to her, especially given what she’d seen. Word about this woman had gotten around, as well, and apparently, to raiders, the blue and yellow Power Armor was a death sentence. As they walked, Cait adjusted the strap of the messenger bag on her shoulder. Cait didn’t know what to make of Janice, though the word cunt definitely came to mind whenever she thought about the Vault Dweller. She hadn’t said anything since she told her where they were going in the theater, and while Janice probably had her own moral code, as evidenced by her actions, Cait described her in her head as a “rude cunt” for a reason.

As they rounded the corner, Cait shielded her eyes from the evening sun. A fence made from various bits of junk met her across the street. At the end, by a wall of rubble from one of the crumbling skyscrapers around them, a lightless neon sign with an arrow pointing to a reinforced door read “Goodneighbor,” the destination Janice had told her. 

“Why are we even going to Goodneighbor?” Cait asked her.

“Information. Guy named Hancock runs the settlement, and he owes me some favors, now that I just wiped the floor with everyone at the Combat Zone.”

“What do you need favors for?”  
“I’m looking for someone. Hancock knows things. You wouldn’t happen to know a guy named Kellogg, would you? Bald, big ass revolver, scar over his left eye?”

“Nope. Sorry.”

“Didn’t think so, but Hancock knows a lot. And he’s got resources, he can help me find him if he doesn’t know where he is.”

As they entered through the door, heads turned and a man said, “Holy shit.” In the parking lot, a couple of makeshift structures had been built, what looked to be small and low quality enough that they should have only been temporary shelter. A couple of junkies chilled in one of them, one wedging a hypodermic needle in between his toes. “Charming place,” Cait commented. A couple of storefronts still saw business, one closed with the light going out in the sky, but the other with an ominous looking robot standing behind the counter, surrounded by a stockpile of guns and explosives. 

To Cait’s relief, Janice led her down an alleyway, away from the robot, and into a brick building. As she stooped to get in through the door, Janice called out, “Hancock!” in an amplified voice, looking up the spiral staircase in the middle of the room.

One of the Neighborhood Watch, the guards of Goodneighbor carrying Thompson brand submachine guns, took a step back from Janice and started to level his weapon, but lowered it with a relieved sigh. Apparently the Vault Dweller’s reputation meant a lot, if it overtook the intimidating appearance. Janice looked down to the watchman. “Is your boss in?” Her voice came out much quieter than it had been. 

He nodded and pointed to Cait, removing a hand from the foregrip of his gun. “Who’s she?”

“Stray I picked up from the Combat Zone. She’s not a raider, if that’s what you’re worried about. Name’s Cait, right?”

The redhead nodded, messy, stringy hair swishing back and forth. 

From above, a raw male voice, similar to Tommy’s, but a little higher, a little softer, said, “I’m coming, I’m coming. Since you haven’t been shot to death yet, I assume Janice is here?”

“That’s right,” Janice said as Hancock came into view, a skinny Ghoul man in a red longcoat, similar to the one worn by the statues around Boston and the mannequins in the museums. A tricorn cap also adorned his shriveled forehead. “I took care of the raiders at the Combat Zone.” Janice set down the minigun beside her, trying not to appear hostile. 

“You did? Show me a bit of proof, why not?” Hancock stepped off the staircase, and Cait noticed his own redhead follow behind him, that one with a half shaved head, and wearing intimidating leather armor. A semi automatic rifle hung on her back on a strap. 

Janice’s armored blue arms with the yellow stripes lifted up to her head, and seemed to wrench her head off for a second, before Cait saw the helmet separate from the sweaty, black hair beneath. The hair stuck to the interior for a moment before Janice handed it to Hancock, who seemed to almost struggle to hold it. “There’s an image I pulled up in there, with all the bodies piled on each other in the Combat Zone. Cait here is the only person I pulled out peacefully.”

Hancock tilted it in his nearly skinless hands until he could see the heads up display inside. “Yeah, I see it. It’s pretty fucked in there. Good work.” He handed the helmet back to Janice, who put it back on. Cait noted brown, nearly black eyes, a nose that had been broken several times, and a scowl to curdle milk. No wonder those raiders thought of her as a devil. “Now, you mentioned to me that you’re looking for somebody, right?”

“Kellogg.” She placed the helmet back over her head. “Nick Valentine told me that he’s a mercenary, and I know that he’s bald, with a scar over one eye. Apparently he doesn’t have any enemies, besides me, because he killed them all.” 

A hacking chuckle sprang out of Hancock’s shriveled mouth. “Sounds like my kind of guy. Alright, there’ve got to be some people that know who he is, apart from the detective. Know anything else about him?”

“I looked around his house. He smokes San Francisco Sunlight brand cigars and carries a .44 caliber revolver with a bull barrel. I’ve seen it.”

“Alright. I’ll tell my people to keep an eye out for him. And, if you don’t mind me asking, how did you see his gun without one of you ending up dead?”

“I do mind. Sorry, Hancock. Nothing personal. You know anyone else who might know where he is?”

“Not really. There’s a guy been spending a lot of time at the Third Rail that used to run with a group of mercenaries. Name’s Macready. He’ll probably know a bit about the local competition.”

“I’ll pay him a visit. Thanks, Hancock.” Her helmeted head turned slightly. “Take care, Fahrenheit,” she said to the redhead behind Hancock. She grunted.

“Come on, Cait,” Janice muttered, barely audible through the helmet as she stalked to the door they’d entered through. Cait couldn’t help but wonder how the ancient, wooden floor supported the incredible weight of the Power Armor wearing Vault Dweller. The asphalt outside almost seemed to struggle with it. 

As they walked through Goodneighbor’s streets and alleyways towards the Third Rail, Cait asked the Power Armor wearing warrior, “So, what’s the problem with this Kellogg guy?”

Silence permeated the air for several seconds, and Cait started to feel impatient. “It’s personal. Let’s leave it at that for now.”

“If you say so. After all, you own me.”

“No, I don’t.” Janice turned around and stepped in front of Cait in the middle of the alleyway, blocking passage through sheer volume. “Go away if you want. If you’re tired of wandering, go to Sanctuary, in the northwest. It’s nice. If you want to stick with me, though, I’d appreciate it.”

Cait shrugged. “I’ll stick with you. Nowhere else to go, really. And I’ve no problem with hoofing it, as long as there’s a fight at the end.”

Janice scoffed. Cait took the half laugh for approval. 

Down in the subway beneath the entrance with the sign that read, “The Third Rail,” smooth jazz sung by a pretty woman in a red dress on a tiny stage settled over the quiet chatter of Goodneighbor residents drinking in the town’s only bar. As Janice stomped in beside Cait, the chatter stopped for a moment as people looked at the Vault Dweller before resuming almost immediately.

“Janice!” the floating, three armed, octopus-like robot behind the bar called in an affected English accent. Janice approached him, narrowly avoiding several tables. “What can I do for you?”

“Hey, Charlie,” Janice said. “Macready. I heard he stays here. Know where I can find him?”

“Yeah, he’s in the back. Say, who’s your friend?” Charlie’s front facing eye swiveled around to Cait on its hinged stalk. “How come you always come here with the pretty women? You aren’t some kind of womanizer?”

Cait opened her mouth to protest, but Janice laughed aloud. “Alright, Charlie. I see how it is. I might come back for a drink later.”

“You’d better. If you’re going to stay for music, then it’s a two drink minimum.” 

Janice cut around the edge of the main room towards what had been an employees only area back when the Third Rail actually was a subway station. The door had a circular window in it, just at Cait’s head height. Just like with every other doorway they’d travelled through to this point, Cait watched Janice stoop to be able to cross the threshold of what looked like the break room. They found, on the other side of the smallish room, a man with a military cap sitting in a red armchair, a scoped rifle propped up against it and a low quality revolver that looked to be made from scrap metal on his lap, his hand wrapped around the polished wooden grip. A pair of men in green fatigues, both holding rifles, stood in front of him.

“... operate in this area anymore, Macready, we’re going to have to come after you,” the man with the pompadour declared, on the right. “It’s either that, or come back with us.”

“Fuck off,” Macready, the man in the chair, said. “I left the Gunners. I won’t work with you, and you can tell the sergeant that. Tell him that anyone you send after me won’t come back, from now on.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Hell, yes it is.” He cocked his revolver. “Now fuck off like I told you to. I like this bar, I don’t want to get kicked out of it for killing two wastes of skin like you.”

“Nice insult,” Cait said, arms folded and a grin across her face. “I could do better, though.” The two men in front of Macready turned around, and their faces paled as they stared at the Power Armor and the colors painted across it.

Janice hefted her gun. “Get out.” 

The pair tripped over each other to follow her orders, the door slamming open as they sprinted. After they left, Janice set down the gun and turned to Macready. “Don’t suppose you’re here to kill me?” Macready asked. 

“Not today,” Janice said. Her voice sounded like narrowed eyes. “I need info. Kellogg, the mercenary, he pissed off the wrong Vault Dweller. You know anything about him?” Cait could see recognition in the young man’s tired eyes.

“I know he’s a scary mother fucker, that’s what I know. Gunners sent ten men after him once, and only one of them came back, minus his right hand and eye. So they sent twenty the next time. Nobody came back. They’ve left him alone from then.”

“So you know where he is?”

“Me? No. Sarge does. Thing is, he and I had a bit of a, uh, falling out. As you might have guessed from the assholes you just scared off.”

“Where’s your sergeant?”

“Well, he’s not my sergeant, not anymore. And he’s at the Mass Pike Interchange. Camp way up in the sky, it’s got its own windmill and everything. If you head out there, either take some extra people or get him word somehow that you want to chat, because I’m sorry, but you can’t take them all on your own. Power Armor’s nice, but there’s a difference between the random raiders you’ve slaughtered and some of the Commonwealth’s best mercenaries. They’d fucking shred you.”

“Thanks.” Janice turned and left without a word. After Macready winked at Cait, she followed the Vault Dweller. Somehow, Janice, in her Power Armor, outpaced Cait until they both got onto the street. “You want to help me kill everyone in the Mass Pike Interchange, Cait?”

“I go where you go, Vault Dweller. At least, until I find something better.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to start putting spaces between paragraphs for this website. Sorry I didn't for the first chapter.


	3. The Vipers of Boston

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing like an ambush to spice up your day.

More than anything else, Ian felt scared. Even here, surrounded by his allies, all some of the best that Tower Tom’s crew had to offer, even with the missile launcher leaning on the wall beside him, fear clawed at his belly. “You see anything, Angie?” he whispered up the fire escape across the alleyway from him. The woman three flights up, looking through her rifle scope, shook her head. Still, Ian could not led himself relax. The second he let his guard down, he’d learned, is when the Blue Bitch or Pickman himself came for you. He pulled the 9 millimeter pistol out of his leather jacket, and pulled back the slide, making sure that it was as clean as it was when he checked a half hour ago. 

Hiding behind dumpsters and abandoned furniture on either side, all the way down the alley and a few behind cars on the street, Ian’s crew laid in wait, some of them chatting in low voices. He couldn’t let himself do that. He needed to plant that missile on the Blue Bitch as soon as he saw her, or else she’d put him in the ground, his crew, too, to go along with the hundred or so gangbangers from in and around Boston she’d already put there. An hour ago, he’d heard that she hit the Combat Zone. Once again, he felt a pang of loss. He always enjoyed himself when he went there, and part of him wanted to see how he’d have fared against the Irish fury in the cage. Now, he’d never have the chance. She’d even gunned down Tommy, the man that ran the fight club, who’d never hurt anyone, not directly. Fury found its way back into Ian’s head, and he once again felt justified in this raid.

“It’s the Bitch!” the woman on the fire escape shouted, before her shot exploded forth. In an instant, Ian’s heart hammered against his chest, as if trying to break out of his ribcage. Seeing movement less than a hundred yards away, he scrambled to pick up the missile launcher and heft it onto his shoulder. Lining up the sights, he saw the marked up, T-51 suit of Power Armor, and his blood ran cold. Bullets ricocheted off of it, and he both heard and saw the Blue Bitch’s minigun spin and begin firing. The screaming man she’d shot added to the cacophony as Ian lined up the shot. He put the sights right on the weakest part of the armor’s torso, but just as he squeezed the firing mechanism, the woman on the fire escape screeched in agony, and he twitched slightly. The brick building on the Blue Bitch’s right exploded in on itself, and the shockwave and the shrapnel tore apart the right arm of the armor. Ian whooped as he saw her right leg buckle and shrapnel jam into the barrels of the minigun. 

As he grabbed his one other missile, Ian felt something slam into the flesh of his outer right thigh. Ian groaned and collapsed forward, planting his back against a dumpster, next to one of his firing allies. “Holy fuck!” the man next to him shouted, crouching down and looking at Ian. “Are you alright?”

“I’ll live,” Ian grunted, and waved at the shooters. “Keep fighting.” There couldn’t have been only one of them. He destroyed her weapon, and incapacitated the armor. The other man got back to it, firing on the Bitch as she struggled to make her Power Armor function. 

“Redhead on the right!” one of the people in the street called. Then an explosion went off in the alleyway, and a chunk of sidewalk cracked open the skin on Ian’s forehead. He was unconscious before he slumped onto the ground.

*****

Cait took the fingers out of her ears after she felt the shockwave of the grenade she’d tossed wash through the broken window above her. For the first time that night, there were more raiders screaming in agony than trying to shoot her to death. She scooted over to a window on her left to keep them guessing and peeked up over the windowsill. The sniper on the fire escape had stopped writhing, but seven writhing silhouettes populated the ground on the street and the alleyway across it. Three had missing legs, and they screamed the loudest. A spray of automatic fire forced her to duck back beneath the windowsill, and Cait started digging .38 caliber bullets out of her bag to load into her revolver. 

After filling the cylinder back up, she fished out a red inhaler. When she finished taking a couple deep breaths, she wrapped her mouth around the open part and squeezed the red body as hard as she could, huffing Jet like a person who’d been drowning a moment ago. She’d seen the man in the alleyway behind the dumpster before taking it. Cait scrambled forward, back to the first window, and stood up, holding her handgun forward with two hands. Time seemed to move in slow motion for her. Just as automatic fire started tearing up the wall beneath her, Cait planted a bullet in the shooter’s head, the other shot going awry. Then the sniper started moving again, and Cait put another bullet in her torso. The high calmed a little after a few seconds, and as far as she knew, nobody on the street but her existed uninjured. After discarding the inhaler, Cait slung her bag back over her shoulder and climbed over the half collapsed building rubble down to where Janice kneeled in her Power Armor, trying to pry loose pieces of crumpled armor with her one functioning arm. “You alright, love?” Cait asked, hands on her hips. 

Janice looked up, and Cait saw that her visor had shattered, revealing those hateful, nearly black eyes. “I’m going to survive. I’ll need one of the Stimpaks in your bag after I climb out, though.”

“No problem.” Cait gestured and the street full of dead and dying raiders. “And, for what it’s worth, I still think you had a pretty good plan.”

“If you’re blaming yourself for my state, it’s not your fault. I should have seen the missile launcher, acted accordingly.”

“Why are you assuming I blame myself? Not everybody hates themselves as much as you do.”

Janice stopped picking to scowl at Cait through her damaged helmet. Cait watched as a drop of blood ran around the woman’s eye to drip down her nose. “I’m looking out for your well being. Self blame ran rampant in the military; I wanted to keep you from that.” She returned to pulling her suit of armor apart. 

Raising her red eyebrows, Cait leaned her weight to one side. “Ah, so you were in the military? I knew you wouldn’t hold your secrets for long.”

“That’s not a secret,” Janice said, just before a piece of metal broke with a near deafening sound. “That’s something that I’m proud of. I helped my country. I tried to protect it in its time of need. And I’m proud of that.”

Cait chuckled, looking around at the destroyed cityscape. “Hell of a job you did.”

Janice grunted in pain and looked up at Cait. Cait couldn’t read much from just her eyes, but none of it was positive. “You’re a real piece of work, Cait, you know that? I was just starting to warm up to you, and then you go and just-” Janice chucked a piece of shrapnel from her leg. “Fuck. You saved my life though, Cait, and I appreciate that. Just try to be a little more conscientious, alright?”

“Sure, Janice.” Cait didn’t think she really knew what conscientious meant. Waiting for Janice to finish, Cait took a seat on the pile of rubble she’d scaled to get into the building. About ten minutes passed, accompanied by clangs, curses, and the occasional pained gasp. Finally, Janice brought herself back up to her feet. 

“I’m getting out,” Janice informed Cait. Before she could react any more than looking up, the Vault Dweller’s Power Armor opened with a hydraulic hiss, the back of it peeling away like someone peeling open a lobster before eating it. A slim woman climbed out, five inch long, sweaty, black hair hanging off her head in a limp mess. A torn and bloodied, blue and yellow, form fitting Vault Suit adorned her, alongside black boots, and a many pouched belt that hung rather heavily on her womanly hips. A 10 millimeter pistol sat in a holster on her hip, and Cait wondered how she had fit it in her Power Armor while wearing it. 

As Janice turned around, Cait thought that she looked very much different that she’d imagined her. And her voice sounded just as different. “Come on, Cait. Let’s get out of here; scavengers will be here soon; they always are just after a gunfight.”

“If you say so.”

*****  
Ian woke up inside a building, someone hunched over the fire in front of him. His head swam, and he gingerly touched the bandage wrapped around it. The woman by the fire turned, and Ian registered her appearance. “Angie. But they shot you, didn’t they?”

“That’s what the Stimpaks are for, big guy.” 

Ian saw that bandages had been wrapped in several places on her torso, beneath her heavily damaged, bloodstained tee shirt. “Are you alright? Are you gonna be?”

“Yeah. I’ve had worse.” Angie turned back around to face the fire. “You know, Tom is going to be pissed at you. Might even put you in the ring.” She patted his outstretched shin. “Figure I should tell you that I don’t want that to happen to you.”

Ian furrowed his brow. “Don’t fuck with me, Angie. Don’t tell me you care about me. I’ve seen you pull some of the most fucked shit I’ve ever seen. Remember interrogating that girl at the farm, finding her jewels? Even after beating her bloody, that wasn’t enough for her. Fuck, the noises she made when you stuffed her knife in her.” He made a noise that was some mix between a disgusted scoff and a laugh.

Angie nodded. “Yeah. I remember. Just because I can be cruel, though, doesn’t mean I can’t also be kind.” Her hand squeezed affectionately around his calf. When she turned around again, a gentle smile adorned her face. “You know, it’s pure luck that we aren’t being picked over by scavvers right now. Tower Tom might want to punish you. So I figure we ought to celebrate our luck while we can.” Before Ian’s addled mind could guess what she meant, Angie leaned forward and grabbed a bottle of liquor from the backpack by the campfire. Ian glanced around in the flickering light, seeing the laundromat that Angie had dragged him into. 

“We didn’t kill her, though. She’s still out there, still killing our people.” Dread settled in his stomach like silt in a riverbed. 

“You fucked up her Power Armor enough for her to leave it behind, though. And that minigun of hers is out of commission. We came the closest we ever have to putting her in the ground, and we reminded her that she’s not a ghost, she’s just a woman.” She laid down on Ian’s torso, putting her upper back on his chest, and took a swig of the moonshine. “You know, we could do it.”

“What?”

“Just fuck off on out of here. Leave the Commonwealth, maybe start our own gang. Or just make it on our own, keep a low profile.”

“Tom would come after us. And I don’t know if I could handle living alone with you for more than a week.”

“Why not?” She shot him a mischievous smile. “We could watch each other’s backs, help build shelter, keep each other warm at night.” Angie blushed at that last statement. “The pair of us, we could make our way. I think we could.”

Ian took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. He left it in silence for a half a minute before saying, “Sorry, Angie. It’s not going to happen. Not unless the Blue Bitch or someone decides to wipe out Tom’s crew and leaves us alone together.” His right hand found her scalp, and scratched it gently beneath her half shaven, brown hair. “I do like you, Angie. I do. And I wish it would work.”

“Me, too.” She settled her head onto his chest and closed her eyes as Ian continued stroking her scalp. “You know,” she whispered, “this close up, I can smell you.”

Ian let out a quiet chuckle. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s alright. Beneath the dust, it’s alright. It’s a manly smell. It’s not that bad.”

Shifting himself to keep his slight arousal unnoticed, Ian pushed the hopeful, romantic thoughts out of his head. Angie was a sadistic bitch, even if she acted a little soft towards him. Not relationship material, to say the least. Of course, neither was he. “Yeah, yeah. Did you take a look at my leg wound? How’s it look?”

“It’s not that bad. Bullet passed straight through, don’t think it messed up any major blood vessels or ligaments. Give it a week, and you’ll be at operating capacity.” Angie took a deep drink of the moonshine and handed it to Ian, who only allowed himself a swig before setting it aside, within her reach. “Ian, d’you want to be a raider?”

“Well, yeah I guess. Sure as hell won’t be a farmer or a scavver.” He scoffed. “What else would I be?”

“Don’t know.” Angie took another swig of the bottle. “You ever loved anyone?”

“I don’t know that I’ve ever loved someone. Can’t imagine what could have made me like that,” he said, the second statement full of sarcasm. “Could be all the murder and torture I get into, could be the being surrounded by drunks and junkies, could be that I can’t even remember what my mother looked like, could be Tower Tom kidnapped me at four and butchered my family. Hell, maybe it’s because I live and work with a bunch of sadistic fucks that kill each other all the time, and if I ever loved any one of them, it’d destroy me because anyone I know could die at any second.” Ian sighed after his rant, Angie’s head rising and falling on top of his chest. “Why do you ask?” he asked, some ironic humor leaking into his voice. 

Half a minute passed before Angie responded. “Thinking about it a lot lately.”

“Oh? There some guy you got your sights set on?”

“Not really. Just, one of the guys I gutted last week. He called me inhuman, a monster. Starting to wonder if maybe, maybe he’s right. So I wondered what makes a human.”

“Who gives a shit if we’re monsters? Makes our enemies more scared of us.”

“I do what I do to survive, Ian. Sorry if maybe I want to live, too.” Angie sat up hard, and scooted against the washing machine on Ian’s left, holding her knees against her breasts.

Ian scoffed. “So that bitch whose vagina you stuffed a knife in, you did that just to survive? You’re in denial, Angie. Sooner you realize who you are, the easier this life will get. Believe me. I realized it a long time ago.” Ian turned over. 

Ten or so minutes passed in silence, and Ian had begun to fall asleep again when he heard Angie sobbing. With a sigh, he turned back over. She’d buried her face into her knees. “What’s the matter, Angie?”

“I’m a monster,” she croaked out in a raw voice. “When I feel the blood on my hands, when I hear them scream, I can’t help but love it. What’s wrong with me? Why do I like this?”

“Because you are what you are. You’re a raider, Angie, and a tough bitch that nobody fucks with. Everyone I know wants to be as hard as you. When was the last time you cried?”

“I don’t know.”

“Exactly. You do what you do, and that guy that called you a monster, he was just saying what everyone says when they see their own guts. You’re not a monster, you’re a badass. You should be proud, Angie. Nobody knows how to get information out of people like you do, and when I leave you alone in a room with a prisoner, you make them scream louder than I’ve ever heard anyone else make them. Besides. Humans aren’t inherently good things, Angie. Everyone has that same urge you do, but we indulge it. The ones that don’t are weak for being scared of their own animal urges. Embrace yourself, Angie, or else you’ll go soft.” Ian pushed himself to sitting up, and his head swam for a moment, making everything shift. It settled after a moment. 

Her sobs had faded out. Angie wiped her cheeks of their tears on her jeans and looked up to Ian, staring at her. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Because I admire you. I want you to show me, Angie, show me what you can do.” Ian put his hands on her knees and leaned on them. “Show me what an animal you are.”

Angie’s eyes hid a thousand emotions running through her head in an instant. Then she lunged forward, pinning him to the ground by his hands and bruising his lips with hers. The chapped skin, the bloody injuries, the pain behind all this, it did nothing but drive them on, adding to the horny adrenaline in their veins. When she started biting his neck, Ian almost regretted this, but not because of the pain. He loved the pain. He almost regretted it because of all the playful ridicule he’d suffer over the bite marks if he ever got back to the other members of Tom’s crew. Then her knee dug into his thigh wound, spilling more blood out, and his last thought of the night was a fleeting one wondering just how bad he’d be limping tomorrow.


	4. Advice of Two Types

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Tower Tom and Nick Valentine, two power players, are introduced.

Janice limped into Diamond City with the assistance of Cait. Some of the guards of the city based in Fenway Park escorted her down the adjacent street down to the gate, suppressing a pair of hostile Super Mutants once, and continuing to engage after she continued. “You know, I really don’t like this place,” Cait said, ignoring the scowl from one of the guards as they walked by. Probably related to her comment. “It’s got its good parts, just like every place, but there’s so many pretentious people.” She shot a look full of disdain at one of the high class restaurants in the Upper Stands. “It’s that damned McDonough’s fault. How the hell did they let him kick the Ghouls out of town?”

“Same way people get shot over suspicion of being a synth.” Janice stopped on an empty, dirt track. The city seemed almost depopulated at night. She pointed at a dark stain in the dirt. “Guy named Mack was murdered right there, by his girlfriend when she found him growing distant from her. Thought only a synth could be so emotionless. The guards executed her immediately afterwards.” Janice looked around at the walls, and the couple of people eating at the 24 hour noodle stand as well as the general store. 

“For all its glamor, people only obey in Diamond City because they’re terrified of synths and terrified of what the guards will do to them if they disobey.” 

“That’s order,” Janice said as she led Cait into alleys just outside of the marketplace. The alleys in Diamond City didn’t contain old structures, but instead some metal and wooden junk shacks. “That’s the way the world works. It’d be great if people would just act civilly towards each other, without us having to have laws, but you know as well as me that that will never happen.”

“Ah, well. Suppose we ought to look out for ourselves, hm?”

“Yeah. This is the place.” Janice leaned on her healthy, left leg, and pointed down an adjacent alley with a glowing neon heart out front, framed with the words, “Valentine’s detective agency.”

“Makes sense that we’d go talk to a detective.”

“Yeah. I already talked to him, though. He was one of the first people I came to when I got out of the Vault, looking for…” Janice stepped quickly down the alleyway, her voice fading into silence. She leaned on the red metal door and sighed. “Looking for someone important to me. Sorry. I just don’t know if I can trust you yet.”

Cait shrugged. “Fine with me. I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you, but that’s mostly because I could probably throw a skin and bones girl like you pretty far.” She grinned, and Janice grinned back before pushing open the door. 

“Hey, Janice,” a woman greeted her as they walked in. Then she pointed to Cait. “Who’s she?”

“Fresh tagalong,” Cait announced. “Name’s Cait.”

The woman seemed not to think anything of it. “Another one? Alright. Nick’s-”

“Right here,” the synth detective said, walking around the corner. Milky white pseudo-skin covered most of him, but much of it had been peeled away, revealing the machinery beneath. Almost his entire neck had gone but for a strip at the front, like a turkey’s wattle. A tan trench coat and fedora adorned him, just like the detectives in pulp mystery novels. “What’s the scoop? You dig up some more information on Kellogg?”

“Yeah. Going to need to deal with some Gunners at the Mass Pike Interchange to get his location, though. It’s going to be a rough fight; I’ll need some backup.”

The woman at the desk looked up from whatever files she’d been observing. “Nick. You’re not built for that. This isn’t your type of thing.”

Nick Valentine shifted his weight. “How many are there?”

“A lot. I’m probably going to be grabbing some Minutemen before we actually go after them.” Janice looked off to the side and snickered a moment. “And I’ll get Piper, the warrior of justice and literacy.”

“I’m sorry, who?” Cait asked.

Nick lifted up a hand. “It’s a long, long story. Anyway, Janice, I’d love to help, but I’m not sure I’m the best option for it. Give me a terminal I’ll hack it and give me a crime and I’ll find the perpetrator, but I’m no warrior.”

Janice nodded. “I understand. I just didn’t want to have to talk to Strong long enough to actually get him to understand my plan of attack.”

“Strong?”

“I have a lot of friends. Strong is the scariest, being a Super Mutant.”  
Cait huffed. “Well, I’m here, so I supposed you must’ve had some weird friends, but I can’t say I’ve ever heard of a friendly Super Mutant. I’d be tempted to call shite on it if it weren’t for what I watched you do today.”

Nick folded his arms. “What’d you do today, Janice?”

“Slaughtered a bunch of raiders. You know, the usual.” 

Cait pointed at Janice’s back. “They call her the Blue Bitch. She’s practically a fuckin’ ghost.”

A smile crawled across Janice’s face. “I like to know that they’re scared of me. They should be.” Her voice came out a growl, made all the more ominous by her grin. The articulate way that she spoke, the confident way she carried herself, and the obvious skill, knowledge, talent, and cruelty that surrounded the woman like an aura unnerved Cait slightly. Just slightly.

A deadpan, almost disapproving expression crossed Nick Valentine’s face. “Jesus, you’re one frightening woman.”

“Thanks, Valentine.”

*****

Feeling more stiff in his muscles than he ever had before, Ian stepped up into the Beantown Brewery parking lot, Angie stepping along beside him. “You think he’ll go easy on you?”

Angie nodded. “It’s you that should worry. Tom punishes the leaders of expeditions, you know that. Still, you did better than anyone else has. And you brought back two survivors, including yourself, and that’s one more than have ever come back from a fight with the Blue Bitch.” The two stepped in front of the door to the several story high brick building. Ian adjusted his leather jacket collar to better conceal the bite marks, inflicted upon him by Angie the previous night, and she giggled slightly. 

Just inside the brewery, an office had been constructed on their right, with a bald guy standing in front of it, smoking. He leaned on the bricks and pulled his cigarette away from his face as he watched Ian and Angie walk in. “Hey, Ian. How’d the raid go?” He took another puff of the cigarette and looked back up. 

Ian eyed the shotgun on the wall next to the guy. “We’re the only two that survived. Fucked her Power Armor, though. Bitch and her friend tagged us both, though, and we didn’t manage to put them out for the count.”

The bald smoker in the tank top nodded. “Yeah, well, it’s good to see you both alive. Honestly, I expected everyone to die.”

As he spoke, Ian looked past the office into the cavernous interior of the brewery. Many oil lanterns had been placed on flat surfaces or hung from lower ceilings, and Ian spotted Tower Tom’s own spot, across the building, over a catwalk. “You and me, both. Think the Tower might have it out for me?”

The smoker shook his head. “Nah. And you ought to go check in with him. I doubt he’ll be happy about your results, but it’s not like it’s your fault. The girl from 111 is a tough bitch.”

“Yeah, he is,” Ian said, leading Angie over to the catwalk. He could see below about thirty raiders eating, sharing drugs, warming up by a campfire set up in the middle of the concrete floor, and cleaning their weapons. Back in the Brewery, Ian felt a bit more relaxed. He couldn’t say he felt safe with all the murderous people there, but it felt a whole hell of a lot better than when on the streets of Boston. He turned his head to see Angie still following him. “If you don’t want to, I can deal with Tom on my own.”

Angie smirked. “If I didn’t know better, I’d almost think that was you trying to be nice to me. It’s like you like me or something. I’ll stick with you, Ian.”

About halfway across the catwalk, Ian paused and asked Angie, “Hey, have you seen Lily lately?”

“Who the hell is Lily?”

“Tom’s pet bitch. If she got loose, he’s going to be in a bad mood.”

“Has he ever been in a good one?”

“On occasion. I’ve seen him smile on Jet, but I don’t think he’s ever actually happy unless he’s just taken a blood shower. And I haven’t seen Lily in about a week.”

“Maybe he finally got tired of fucking the same bitch and gutted her. I don’t know. Could see myself doing that, if I had all that power that Tower Tom does.”

Ian folded his arms and quirked an eyebrow, but a corner of his mouth went up with the eyebrow. “Oh, am I hearing envy?”

“Who the hell doesn’t want to be king of their own little country?”

Ian started walking again. “Right. I see your point.” On the side of the catwalk opposite the front door to the building, there was a gap between it and Tower Tom’s office. Ian would have to press a button to extend the catwalk to meet it. No need to knock on doors with the rattle that it made. Sure enough, as Ian stood at the end of the catwalk, waiting for it to extend, he saw the door open on the other side of the gap, revealing the nearly seven foot tall man known as Tower Tom. There was only a light behind him, shading him into a silhouette, and adding to his intimidating presence. 

Nervous, Ian stuck his hands in his pockets and hung his head as Tom’s booming voice came forth over the racket the catwalk had worked up. “Is that Ian Gurms that I see?”

“Yes, sir,” Ian said in a more suitable voice as the catwalk finished extending and quieted down. 

“Where is the Bitch’s head? I asked you for that in particular; I wanted to strip the flesh from it and keep the skull as a keepsake.”

“We, we couldn’t finish her off, sir. She had a minigun, a friend, she flanked us, and I fucked up her Power Armor, but then there were grenades-”

Tom clicked his tongue to shut him up and stomped across the latticed catwalk towards Ian. He loomed over the man, making him feel more a boy than he had since he only possess 10 years. “Your people are all dead.” A meaty, massive hand lifted and pointed at Angie, who stood up straight behind Ian. “Except for her. Explain this to me.”

Angie spoke up before Ian could think. “I took a couple of bullets, sir, and they left me for dead, but I pulled a Stimpak after they left, and I’ll live. I saw a chunk of shrapnel hit Ian in the forehead, knocked him out. I wrapped him up.” The woman stuck a finger in Ian’s head bandage, and he couldn’t help but snigger a little bit. “It’s as Ian said. The others were either shredded by the Bitch’s minigun, taken out by a grenade, or gunned down as the Blue Bitch’s redheaded friend flanked us.”

Tower Tom took a sharp intake of breath at the mention of Cait’s hair color. “Do you think this redead bitch is associated with Red Tourette?”

“I doubt it,” Ian said. “Tourette’s crueler’n us, and the Blue Bitch hates raiders. No way they aren’t enemies.”

Tom nodded. After a moment of thought, he asked, “You said you disabled her Power Armor. You landed a hit with the missile launcher?”

“Yeah, but she pulled herself out of the wreckage. If we had known she had someone with her, then we could have prepared.” Ian punched his own palm. “We could have taken her out already!”

“What direction did she head in? After the ambush.”

“Bitch went towards Diamond City,” Angie said. “Only, the thing is, she left the site of the ambush about nine hours ago. Didn’t want to move Ian too far, with him being unconscious and hurt.” She gave his upper arm a gentle squeeze. 

Tower Tom’s thick lips tightened together. He leaned forward, took a big whiff of the air between the two raiders, and leaned back. “I smell sex on the both of you. You’re sure that you didn’t just fuck straight through the ambush?”

Ian lifted the area where his pant leg had been cut to reveal a bloody bandage on his thigh. “I’m pretty damned sure, sir.”

Unexpectedly, Tom smiled after his statement. “It’s good that you’ve moved on enough past your defeat to screw, then. If those wounds don’t start healing properly, you know who to talk to.” Tom turned about and started again for his quarters. “Until then, keep in shape and don’t kill anyone in here that you don’t have to.” The door to his office slammed shut and Ian breathed a sigh of relief.


	5. Stink

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mystery torturer! Oh, and some Steel fellows. Those of you who've played the heck out of FO4 probably know who the torturer is, but, just in case anyone cares, please don't spoil it for anyone.

With the aid of a Stimpak, Janice managed to get walking on her own, again, on the way north out of Boston towards Sanctuary. As they crossed a bridge, interrupted by a ship that wrecked before the bridge could be opened out of the way, Janice wrinkled her nose and pointed at the deck and flotilla of other boats lashed together on the water below. “Wiped out a crew of raiders there. Smells like nobody’s been by to clean up the mess besides bloatflies and sea fowl.”

Cait shrugged. “I can’t smell shite, but then, I hardly notice the stink of death or disease, not anymore.”

Janice humphed and muttered, “Must help with getting laid.”

“What was that?” 

Janice leapt the tiny gap between the two bridge halves, and waited for Cait to do it as well, but she stayed up at the top, hands on her hips, sun framing her in an ironically angelic manner. “I said that must help with getting laid.”

“What, not smelling the harsh stuff?”

“Yeah. I mean, I’ve had a few, em, situations, where I would have normally found somebody attractive, but then they get all up close on me and they stink.” Cait hopped down beside her, chuckling a bit. “What? It fucking sucks! You’re wondering why I’m so uptight, I can hardly stand standing right here beside you, for Christ’s sake, it’s because I haven’t touched anyone in an intimate way for two damned centuries! And you don’t even stink much.”

Cait scowled and brushed past her. “Thanks for the fuckin’ compliment, sunshine. Just wondering, was everyone really that clean down in the Vault? Y’know, I’ve heard some stories, and they don’t sound like paradise or whatever shite was advertised.” She pulled a piece of squirrel jerky out of her bag and worried at it. “Because nobody in the Commonwealth that I’ve met really complains unless you’re riddled with disease. Of course, I come from different circles than you do, no doubt?”

“What makes you say that?”

“The way you talk. You went to some fancy fuck school.” A tinge of irritation touched her voice. “Ya don’t get why people want to fuckin’ kill each other over a bag of potatoes because you were born with a goddamn silver spoon in your mouth. Makes it easy to think of us as scum.” She kept moving. “Killing people by the fucking hundreds. I don’t care if you’re trying to be a nice girl, people still call that being a monster.”

A strong hand clamped on Cait’s shoulder, the strap of her vest being the only thing keeping Janice’s fingernails from digging into her skin. They both stopped, and Janice’s face belied her fuming emotions. “You don’t know the first fucking thing about me, Cait. So I suggest you get the foot out of your mouth before I’m forced to put mine in there through your ass.”

Cait turned around, a scowl on her face and hands on her hips. “I’d like to see you try, ya nasty cunt.”

Jaw clenched, Janice’s hand wavered dangerously close to the handle of her pistol. Cait’s right hand hung over her bag. Her revolver hung in the side pocket. Then they both heard rapid laser fire not two hundred meters away to the west. Janice pulled Cait into an alley, and she only struggled a little, before realizing Janice’s protective intentions. Right up in the redhead’s face, Janice said, “You were magnificent in stopping that ambush, so I’m going to let this go. Just know that if you hadn’t done that, you’d be broken on the ground right now.”

Cait scoffed but didn’t say anything. Janice leaned against the wall of the alley and lifted her Pip Boy on her wrist up to her eye level. “I’m going to see if I can’t find something on the radio to lighten the mood. God knows we need it.” After a few seconds of getting static while tuning the radio, though, a panicked, female voice came through.

“This is Scribe Haylen of the Brotherhood of Steel. My squad and I are stuck at the Cambridge Police Station, and we are currently under attack. We’ve suffered heavy casualties, and are requesting assistance from anyone in the area-”

Janice cut the feed with a sigh and looked up at Cait. The Vault Dweller looked in the direction of the laser fire. “That’s the Cambridge Police Station, in that direction. You wanna go play hero?”

“Hell fucking no. Now come on, let’s go save their arses.”

Janice chuckled, said, “I knew I had a good reason for bringing you along,” and took off down the alley in the direction of the laser fire.

*****

With the imminent threat of death, Knight Rhys groaning in incredible pain and clutching his right leg, the growls of at least fifty feral ghouls nearby, laser weapons going off, and Paladin Danse’s Power Armor stomping about ten feet away, Haylen’s hands couldn’t help but shake. Knight Rhys lay just in front of where she knelt, on the patio in front of the Cambridge Police station, firing shot after shot from his laser pistol with one hand while the other tried to pinch shut the artery in the spewing wound in his leg. 

“Just a moment, Rhys,” Haylen said, trying and failing over and over again to thread the needle from the medkit sitting beside the Knight. 

“Quit fucking around and fix me!” he growled after a few seconds. Just as Danse shouted something derogatory and no doubt racist towards the mindless feral ghouls, Haylen managed to thread the needle. 

“Haha!” she said, preparing to sew up Rhys’ wound. The entire right thigh of his orange uniform had gone red with blood, and he was starting to pale. Still, Knight Rhys managed to muster enough strength to bat the smaller Scribe Haylen to the side. She watched as she burned several holes into the rotting face of a charging feral. The corpse collapsed on him, and he shrugged it off. When she knelt beside him again, though, needle in hand, she found the thread had come loose. She groaned, and then cowered for an instant as she heard ballistic gunfire from behind her. 

“Friendlies! Check your fire!” the Paladin called. 

“Ad Victorium,” Scribe Haylen muttered, and threaded the needle again in one go. The world seemed to fall away as she focused in on her task, Knight Rhys’ occasional twitches and cries not affecting her in the slightest. All that existed was her needle and the wound that needed to be patched. Still kneeling as she slapped a field dressing on the wound, Scribe Haylen leaned back to sit on her feet. The world came back into focus as Rhys lay on the ground, eyes squeezed shut, and a couple of tears having run down the side of his shaved bald head. Paladin Danse stalked the battlefield, crushing the skulls of the still technically living ghouls beneath his massive, Power Armored boot, and two women sat on the steps in front of her, chatting and reloading their magazines and weapons. The one on the right wore black hair, and a blue and yellow Vault Suit with the number 111 on the back. The redhead on the left wore tight pants, a canvas bag on her shoulder, and a slightly too large, threadbare vest. 

They looked like trouble to Haylen, but then, everything in the Commonwealth that wasn’t Brotherhood of Steel did, and even some things that were in her organization. 

As Danse squashed the last ghoul skull, he turned and walked across the multitudinous bodies towards the women on the steps. “You two handle yourselves well. Might I ask what you’re doing here?”

“Heard you callin’ on the radio,” Cait said, “and boss-lady wanted to help.”

Janice chuckled and gave Cait a playful nudge. “You’re the one that suggested we go to help. Save their arses, you said.” 

“Well, I very much appreciate your assistance,” Danse said. “I’m Paladin Danse, Brotherhood of Steel. Those two on the patio are members of the same organization, Knight Rhys and Scribe Haylen, respectively. Might I ask your names?” The two gave him their names. “Thank you. Now, I could also use some assistance with a different matter, and if you’d be willing to help I’d appreciate it. Scribe Haylen?”

Knight Rhys raised his hand. “Hate to interrupt,” he said, full of sarcasm, “but can we talk inside? I feel like my leg’s getting infected just from proximity to those things.” He shot a glare at the multitude of partially rotted corpses strewn about the courtyard. 

Paladin Danse cracked a smile. “It’s alright with me.” He turned to the women on the steps. “Come on. We’ll talk inside.”

*****

Several of the raiders outside of the federal ration stockpile jeered as two of them dragged a beaten and bloodied, balding, older man towards the entrance. Blood streamed down his face from a cut above his eye and from his broken nose. He could barely tell what everything around him was, the beating had disoriented him so much. By the time the sunlight had stopped hurting his eyes and they’d taken him downstairs, the man came to the conclusion that he’d been concussed, and that he’d probably never leave. 

“What do you want?” he asked as they threw him into a chair in a small room, a spotlight down on him. The halls had twisted so much he didn’t know if he’d be able to find his way out, even if there weren’t thirty or more people between him and the exit. “I’ll tell you anything.” A fist slammed into his gut, but when he tried to hunch forward, strong hands held him sitting straight up. 

“Yeah, you will,” a woman said, and the older man looked up with squinty eyes to see a large woman with a twisted, deformed iron mask on her face. Parts looked as though they were still melting, and the mouth was twisted into a scream. A six inch long combat knife sat tight in her grip, and the old man started to breathe heavily. “Alright, old man. I’ll ask you some questions, and you’ll answer them. You refuse to answer or you lie to me, I’ll cut something off.” As she spoke, the other raiders set to tying his arms and legs to the chair. “Let’s start with something easy. What’s your name?”

“Wily, um, Wily Adams.”

“Do you know who Tower Tom is?”

“Y-yeah. He’s a gang boss in Boston, headquarters at the Beantown Brewery.” He nodded up and down in quick, tiny motions. 

“Do you work for him?”

“Uh, yeah, I suppose.”

“What do you mean, you suppose? What do you do for him?”

“I-I take money and supplies from the Brewery to Bunker Hill and back. He gives them a bit, they give a lot.”

“Have you seen a girl in his company? Not like his fighting bitches, but a smaller one, about fifteen or sixteen? Blond hair. He probably doesn’t let her far out of his sight.”

“U-um, no, ma’am. Haven’t seen any little girls around him.” He furrowed his brow. 

The woman with the knife nodded and stepped up to him. She leaned right up to his face, and he couldn’t see any emotion at all besides wrath in her eyes behind her mask. “This is your fault,” she said, and he barely registered her grabbing the tip of his ear and pulling before she sliced it off with the knife. 

The man yelped and started hyperventilating. “I swear! I never saw no girls around him!”

“Liar!” She sliced open the bridge of his nose, drawing another hiss and spraying blood across the mask and her front. “Next one takes your nose off. Now, start talking. What do you know about the girl that Tower Tom has with him?”

“N-not much. I-I-I might’ve heard, overheard, some c-conversations o-or something.” His knuckles went white knuckled where he clutched the arms of the chair. “One time, yeah, one time, Tom, Tower Tom, I saw a girl in the room he came out of to talk to me.” Words spewed from his mouth faster than the blood ran down his face, though he had to spit a bit out down his front as he spoke. “H-he hit me, and told me to f-forget about her, so I tried to, I’m sorry, I tried to.” Tears started leaking down his cheeks as he squeezed his eyes shut. He barely noticed, but the other raiders had left him alone with the woman. 

“What did she look like? Was she hurt? Was she hurt?!” Her scream made him flinch, and choke back a sob.

“No! She, she just looked a bit sad, that’s all. Nobody wants to be around Tower Tom.”

“When did you see her?”

“Not two weeks ago. I-I’m sorry I was dishonest, ma’am, I’m sorry.” 

“That’s alright,” the woman said, and plunged the knife into his heart. His face looked like agony for several seconds before it began to slacken. She pulled it out, and strode to the door to let in the next prisoner to be questioned in, even as the dead man’s bowels loosened and the stink of death filled the chamber.


	6. Arcjet

“Danse mentioned we’re members of the Brotherhood of Steel,” Scribe Haylen said, perched up on the counter in the main room of the police station. She took up the only clear spot, weapons, medical equipment and a distress radio taking up the majority of the counter space. Cait and Janice stood in front of her, Cait with her hands on her hips. The Paladin in his Power Armor, minus the helmet, walked about collecting some equipment for some expedition. “We’re a recon team, sent to scout out the Commonwealth, maybe even get some people prepared for our arrival.”

“We’ve been under fire from day one,” Paladin Danse said, reloading his laser rifle off to the side. “We were also here to investigate the disappearance of another recon team. We were seven when we started. I thought we’d be down to two for a moment, there.”

Knight Rhys sat up against the wall on a yellow bedroll. “Don’t worry, sir. I’ll live.” Janice noted that sweat still beaded on his forehead, and every now again he’d wince in pain, but she supposed that little could be done for it. 

Scribe Haylen spoke up again. “Anyway, we need to send a signal to the Brotherhood. We set up in here because it has a radio, but the signal isn’t strong enough to send a message to the Brotherhood around D.C. There’s a device at a facility near here, at least, there ought to be. I’d tell you what it is, but the terminology would probably be lost on you. Paladin Danse knows what it looks like.”

Mouth shrank to the side, Cait shifted her weight. “We gettin’ paid for this?” 

“I will give you a small sum of caps if and when we are successful in retrieving the device from Arcjet Laboratories.”

Janice shook her head. “I don’t want caps. I want your help. I’m going up against the Gunners at the Mass Pike Interchange soon, and it’d be great to have an extra two or three fighters on my side to tip the scales.”

Paladin Danse shook his head and Janice let the air out of her lungs, mouth tight shut. “I’m sorry, but our mission takes prerogative here. I can offer you a bit of help, though.” He lifted up his laser rifle. Cait noted the beam focuser, reflex sight, and beefy mechanism around the Fusion Cell. “This is my personally modified version of the Brotherhood standard laser rifle. I’m no prodigy, but I can boast some knowledge of energy weapons. You can have it when we get back from Arcjet.”

Looking at Janice’s hungry eyes, Cait never doubted for a second what her response would be. “It’s a deal. Now, then. What kind of problems will we run into at Arcjet?”

“I don’t know,” Danse said, picking his helmet up. He took a moment to fasten it over his head and set off out the door. Out in the noontime air, right out in front of the police station, the smell from the rotting Ghoul bodies almost made Cait’s nose wrinkle. “We ought to prepare for the worst, though. It’s a bit of a hike there, and one thing that’s definite about the Commonwealth is that you cannot take a walk without being assailed by something.”

Cait let off a scoffing chuckle. “You got that right.”

Paladin Danse led them on the scenic route towards Arcjet in order to avoid the feral ghouls infesting Lexington. They traipsed in silence for about ten minutes before Paladin Danse said something. “Contact, about two hundred meters up the road.” Cait hadn’t noticed anything, but as he took cover beside a burned out tree beside the road, she saw a few people, about ten, , marching down the road, postures suggesting that they carried weapons. 

“Plan of attack?” Janice asked him as Cait was still figuring out what he meant by contact. She almost felt stupid, but attributed her mental fog to the Jet she’d huffed in the bathroom before leaving Cambridge. 

“You two go down to the waterfront, sneak around that way,” Danse said. “I’ll take the high ground, draw their fire. Then you can get them from the back.”

“Sounds good to me,” Cait said, and pulled the revolver from her bag. “Let’s go bust some heads, shall we?” She and the Vault Dweller sped off across the road, trying to get going before their movement drew the attention of the people down the road. Paladin Danse’s stomping footsteps faded away after a few seconds. 

“So, what do you make of dancer back there?” Cait whispered to Janice as they crept along the beach down the hill. A small cliff, about ten feet up, had been worn away by the water, but the low tide exposed the beach. “Seems as stiff as his Power Armor to me.”

“I had the same reaction,” Janice said, holding her pistol up in front of her, but not aiming. “I see a bit of me in him, though. He’s being careful, not showing his soft parts to us just yet.”

“Smart. Ya know, I talked to this guy who trained Mirelurks once. Or at least tried to. They actually let you see their bellies when they’re comfortable, he said.” 

“Shh. Voices.” Janice pointed up at the cliff. A few rocks sat in the sand, enough so that they could peek over the cliff if they stood on them on their toes.

“... isn’t sitting right,” a man’s voice carried over the cliff, full of wheeze. “You sure you cooked it all the way?”

“You can’t cook a Brahmin steak all the way through,” a different man with a higher voice said. “Maybe you didn’t pick out all the bullets and swallowed one of them. How fast you were eating, wouldn’t have surprised me if you didn’t notice.”

“It’s probably just all this fucking walking. Swear-” Cait heard their footsteps stop, and she started fidgeting, getting anxious for the coming fight. “Did you see that? Up on the hill? Think someone’s up there.”

The high energy, almost electric sound of laser fire started a moment later, followed immediately by the type of screaming Cait knew to be caused by severe burns. She didn’t take the prudent, hide and shoot path that Janice did, but instead used the extra energy afforded her by the Jet to leap off of one of the boulders at the base of the cliff to get up it. Janice shouted her name, but she barely heard it. Adrenaline had already deafening her to everything around her. The Psycho she constantly had in her veins made sure of that whenever she fought someone. 

A man had taken cover beside a burned out tree not thirty feet away from her, and she crossed the distance between them in the second he took to notice her, putting two bullets from her revolver into his torso at the same time. As his rusty, makeshift gun fell to the ground beside him, he groaned, clutching his wounds. Cait took his cover and absentmindedly put a bullet in her brain, frantically looking around at the people in the road and making use of some of the natural cover. Another man lay prone beside a pair of bushes, trying to peer through them at the Paladin. He lay at an oblique to Cait such that her cover, the tree, wouldn’t matter, that is, if he had noticed her. She emptied the last three shots into him.

 

Instead of taking the time to reload, Cait picked up the rusty piece of shit beside the dead man at her feet and immediately took cover again. A woman screaming obscenities in the street had noticed her, and sprayed a shots from an automatic weapon at her. When Cait peeked, though, she saw a couple of people lying in the street, dead from Danse’s ambush, though one was still writhing, clutching at vicious burns all over his torso. 

Three shots rang out from Janice’s position, and Cait almost shot her before remembering that she was friendly. When she looked back out into the street, the woman by the car had slumped against it, bleeding profusely from her mostly bare leg and another shot that had passed through her neck. Cait kept looking around for a few seconds before realizing that the gunfire had stopped. Apparently only three of them had made it to cover before Danse killed them. “All clear, boss!” Cait called. They were all back heading down the road before she’d even finished reloading her revolver. 

“That was some good shooting, Danse,” she heard Janice say while focusing intently on getting the fucking bullet into the fucking chamber while her fucking fingers kept fucking twitching. 

“The Brotherhood trained me well,” Paladin Danse said, walking beside Cait’s boss. “Where did you learn to shoot? Being a Vault Dweller, I expected you to be a little inept when you showed up, but you’ve shown yourself to be nothing if not capable so far.”

Janice shot Cait a glance out of the corner of her eye that she didn’t know how to read. “I suppose I’ll have to tell you sooner or later, too, Cait. Well, this might come as a bit of a shock, I don’t know, but I was actually born about thirty two years before the Great War. Down in the Vault, Vault 111, we, er, that is, everyone else in the Vault, were cryogenically frozen. For 210 years.” It looked to Cait like Janice was purposefully avoiding looking at either her or Paladin Danse. “Nobody else survived. The process was imperfect. It took me almost two weeks to bury everyone.” The emotion had gone from her voice. “I was drafted for the Great War. The United States Army trained me. And I saw a lot of experience in the field. I expect the training was pretty similar to yours, Paladin.” Her tone became a bit more positive as she revealed the potential track of dumping the talking duty on Danse.

As Danse started talking about how the Brotherhood of Steel grew out of the American military after the bombs fell, Cait tuned him out for the most part, watching Janice. The Vault Dweller didn’t look her usual wary self, but instead watched her feet. The way her hair fell on either side of her head, combined with the context of revealing she’d watched her whole world die, hit Cait in the chest, much harder than she thought it should. Normally, she’d shrug off this kind of thing. Then again, she had only met a couple of Ghouls from before the War, and they didn’t tell stories about it. 

Cait lost herself in thought as they walked. She hardly noticed the almost ominous building on the hill until Danse led them right up to the front doors, saying, “Here we are. Arcjet Labs. Now, we don’t know what to expect inside, so keep your eyes open.”

As Janice pulled out her 10 millimeter, Cait, “Hold on a minute. I need to go make water.” She started for the corner of the building, to get around it. When she got around it, she felt certain that there was a fight waiting for her in there, and after she finished evacuating her bladder into a pothole, she pulled out the last filled syringe in the bag. She found that same hole she’d used last time in the crook of her left elbow with the tip of the needle and depressed the plunger, feeling that liquid fire course through her veins. Psycho. The word defined her, both in her addiction and her actions. She couldn’t go a day without it, and if she tried to fight while sober, she just couldn’t aim, couldn’t find the blood vessels to rip out with a knife or her teeth. Jet could help with the aiming and the addiction shakes, but when she needed to kill, needed to push that empathy out of her head, nothing could replace Psycho. 

She almost skipped around the building back to the others, and while she couldn’t say that the Psycho had made her happy, it definitely pumped her up. Just like every other damned building she’d ever been in, this one was wrecked. Debris had been strewn about the rooms, blown out terminals sat on desks, and dust lay just about everywhere. One thing, she noticed, though, was that some of it had been disturbed recently; someone else had been there.

It took Danse until they wandered into a room full of ruined Protectrons, the awkward, potbellied robots all over the floor with their circuitry hanging out to realize what Cait had seen from the dust. “I know who did this,” Danse said, kneeling to look at the lifeless things.

“How?” Cait asked, skeptical.

“Look around. There’s no blood, no spent shell casings. Institute synths did this,” he said, his tone full of disgust and disdain. “Abominations. But our armaments can handle them all the same.”

“It’s not like the Commonwealth isn’t full of abominations that I’ve handled before,” Janice said. In her patched up and sewn back together Vault Suit, Cait wouldn’t have expected her to speak with such confidence and conviction about the horrors of the ‘Wealth. The lines around her eyes, though, and the deftness with which she fingered that pistol led her to believe her statement about being trained Pre-War. As they continued through the ruined building, Janice kept talking. “I should tell you about when I wandered into Lexington-”

“Later,” Cait said. “Dancer’s stompin’ about gives us away enough without you runnin’ your mouth.” 

Janice nodded and fidgeted with her pistol’s safety. The redhead hardly noticed, though, waiting with bated breath for the Paladin’s inevitable, “It’s Danse, not dancer.”

A blue laser beam reflected off of Danse’s Power Armor at the same instant he called out, “Contact!” and taking up the entire doorway, both protecting Cait and Janice from the laser fire and preventing them from aiding him. His undeniable skill meant that he handle the four skeletal, robotic synths in the next room, but Cait felt anger boiling in her belly.

Knowing that it wouldn’t hurt him, she slapped Danse’s breastplate as soon as he gave the all clear. He quirked an eyebrow as she raved, “The hell, Danse? You don’t think we can’t do it, too, huh? Or is it that you want to protect the little ladies from the big, bad synths?”

After giving her a moment to stop, mouth tight, Danse said, “Do you need to step outside, Cait? I can see that something had incensed you, and that kind of attitude is not conducive to the success of a combat operation.”

“The fuck does that even mean?” Cait implored, throwing her hands up. When Janice put her hand on Cait’s shoulder from behind, the angry redhead almost decked her. 

“Cait, go wait outside.”

Cait wanted to rant and rave more, but she could see in the Vault Dweller’s nearly black eyes that she wouldn't get far into it. When she left, though, she planted a shoulder into Janice’s and tried to take what pleasure from that she could. Anger settled in her stomach as she trudged over the debris to get outside, but not at Danse for acting protective, rather, at both of her companions for keeping her from fighting something. 

She went picking through the bag as she waited in the decrepit parking lot out front. 22 .45 caliber bullets for her snub nosed revolver, 4 Stimpaks, the empty Psycho syringes, an inhaler full of Jet, plus two more sticks of that squirrel jerky and a pint can of clean-ish water. The energy from the Psycho kept her pacing, thumbing the handle of her handgun, hoping something would hop out of the bushes so she could gun it down. She ended up wrapping a fallen tree limb in one of her socks for a handle and wailing on the tree it’d fallen off, yelling the whole while. As it snapped, she felt herself coming down, and then found herself cursing. Her sock had torn, almost in half. Of course it had. Ten minutes had passed, and Janice had yet to come out. She knew that she’d be taking her time in a dangerous area, especially with the robot going with her. Ten minutes was too little time.

Why worry this much? If it had been someone else, someone without the reputation that the Vault Dweller (or the Blue Bitch, depending on who you ask) had, Cait would have just walked off down the road, left her for dead. Synths were hardly more dangerous than your average Gunner, anyway, and she had one of those high ranking Brotherhood people with her. Nothing short of an Alpha Deathclaw should put her in real danger. Yet the pit of Cait’s stomach felt tight, like she’d eaten something that was about to come back up. She knew where she’d go if Janice died, anyway. 

Cait decided it was the mystery. She needed to figure out this woman, who she was, what she was trying to do with her life, find out the secrets she was hiding. Why didn’t she still wear her wedding ring? Did she name her gun? How had her eyeliner stayed on so long? Where’d she get the funny shaped scar on her eyebrow? So many questions yet to be answered. Curiosity replaced the fear in her gut, at least for a little while. 

Twenty minutes later, the door opened behind her, and Cait whirled around, having to restrain herself from shooting at the Vault Dweller and Brotherhood Paladin walking through the door. “What took ya so fuckin’ long?” she asked, stowing her gun again. As they walked out, Cait noticed the soot on the Paladin’s armor.

“The Paladin here took a bit more fire than we expected,” Janice said, cracking a tiny grin. “As I had no idea what the thing we were looking for actually looked like, I had to wait until he was good to go to actually find it.”

“Can we get going, then? I’d really like to sleep in an actual bed sometime soon,” Cait said, placing a hand on her hip. 

“Yeah, we helped you,” Janice said, turning to the Paladin. “I’ll take that rifle off your hands, now, if you don’t mind.” Cait noticed a bit of snark behind her voice there and wished she’d been there to see what happened. 

“I’d prefer to wait until we return to Cambridge Police Station to relinquish my weapon.”

Cait scoffed. “Oh, come off it, Paladin. You’re wearing a bloody damned weapon. Now hold up your end of the deal.”

In a calmer, more diplomatic tone, Janice said, “It’s hardly a mile back to the station, and people hardly want to mess with someone in Power Armor as nice as yours. You ought to be fine.”

A moment’s silence passed, and the Paladin said, “I don’t like it, but I gave my word. You can have my laser rifle.” He shoved it towards Janice with a bit more attitude than Cait expected, but Janice took it from his gauntleted hand with little effort. 

“Is the Fusion Cell charged?” Janice asked, peeking down the sights.

“Yes. And the Cells you took off the synths ought to be compatible with it.” 

Janice looked up at him and flashed a momentary smile. “Alright. Well, thanks for this. Might pop by Cambridge next time I’m in the area.” 

“I’ll see you, then,” the Paladin said, his tone emotionless, and stomped off towards the south. Janice shot Cait a shrug, and they started in the opposite direction.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a bit of a longer chapter than the other ones, and I mostly included so much detail to try and flesh out the characters and their types of actions a bit more.


	7. Justice

Looking at the satellite station half a mile away as he walked, Preston said to the three people with him, “Remember, they’re murderers. Blake Abernathy’s daughter is dead by their hand. We can have no empathy for them. At the same time, we can’t show the same kind of cruelty that they have. If someone yields, spare them.”

“What if they grab a gun and turn on us after yielding?” the young man on his left with the red hair said. 

“I said spare them, not set them loose, Eddy,” Preston pointed out. “Everyone’s good on ammo? Lawrence, how many shells have you got?”

“Ten,” the big man with the cropped beard said, drumming his fingers on his double barrel shotgun’s wooden foregrip. “It ought to be enough, right?”

“It’ll have to be.” 

The woman with them rocked the bolt on her rusty, handmade submachine gun back and forth several times, making sure it wasn’t sticky. Valve oil and dog tallow was only so effective as a lubricant with these kinds of forces. “Garvey, if it starts to go south, what then?”

She watched him glance over his shoulder. “You’ll wait for my order, Mary. You’ve all got Stimpaks to stop the bleeding in case you get hit, right?”

The other Minutemen nodded and spoke assent. Mary held the barrel of her submachine gun with one hand and flicked her hair bun with the other, making sure it wouldn’t come loose if she jostled it. Lawrence, the big man with the dense, black hair fidgeted with the break action on his shotgun. The youngest, Eddy, couldn’t stop spinning one of the loose .308 bullets in his pocket between his fingers.   
*****  
Just as the redheaded woman with the scrolling facial tattoos sat down on her bed and removed her mask, the door banged open. “Red Tourette!” the shirtless man standing in her doorway said. “Miss Tourette, I just got word that your group at Walden Pond has been giving rations to Tower Tom’s crew. What do you want to do?”

The woman with the facial tattoos chucked her solid iron mask at the man, smacking him in the sternum. The man stumbled backwards, groaning and clutching his chest as Red Tourette shouted, “Get Zeus and fucking gut her! I told you that Tom doesn’t have her anymore, so we aren’t giving him shit! Get me her head, and all of you, goddamn it, all of you, quit calling me Red, you stupid shits!” She stomped across the wooden floor and scooped her mask off the ground before kicking the man in the ass as he walked away. After slamming her door with almost enough force to break the door jamb, Tourette stalked over to her terminal and sat down, opening up a new entry. “It took five for the stupid fucks to finally spill it. Five killings, five rounds of shitting and screaming and dying, before I got to the last bitch. I made her watch me feed her friend his own guts, so she was pretty wigged out by the time I got to her. All it took was a few splinters underneath her fingernails for her to tell me what he did. Lily tried to get away. My sister. Of course she did, she’d never let a guy like Tom hold her long. When they caught her, though, she went down hard. Apparently, her body’s been flavoring their beer ever since. I saved the bitch I took from them. She’ll be good for me getting my anger out without killing my own people.”  
*****  
Mary and Lawrence flanked the door to the shack outside the fence, on the hill, above the Olivia satellite station. After exchanging a nod, Lawrence kicked in the door, and they both turned to look inside. The man in the chair reading the magazine scrambled for his handgun on the table beside him, but Lawrence dumped two shells into him, and he sputtered and expired within a few seconds. The guy in the sleeping bag had woken up by then, and he sprang up, a knife suddenly in his hand. Mary sprayed five bullets at him, and three ripped through his torso before the last two went through his neck and into his brain. He died before he hit the ground. 

“It’s clear!” Lawrence’s voice boomed towards the men down the hill, thumbing a couple of shells into his gun. Preston and Eddy charged all the way up the hill, hearing a bit of clamoring from the satellite station as the raiders finally realized what was going on. As he ran, Preston cranked up his laser musket. 

Eddy knelt by the glassless window, bracing his bolt action pipe rifle against his shoulder, while Preston lifted up his musket while standing. “Lawrence, Mary, don’t go just yet. They’ll probably launch a counter attack.”

“They’re coming up the hill now!” Eddy pulled the trigger just after saying this, dropping one of the men charging up the hill, stumbling, to the ground. His screams rang out over the countryside while his allies took cover in bushes and among trees. As one of them dived down behind a bush, though, Preston pulled the trigger on his laser rifle, sending a beam of intense, red light light towards him and burning a hole through the bush and into the man behind it. Return fire slammed into, and in some cases, through the wooden structure, and Preston took a knee behind the table, laying his musket on top of it. 

Mary, peeking out from beside the window, saw Lawrence doing the same on the other side, and said, “Lawrence, save your ammo for inside. We’ll need it there.”

“Whatever,” Lawrence said with a grumble as Mary opened fire and dropped a man trying to move between cover. Almost immediately, a bullet burst through the wood beside Lawrence, sending splinters into his cheek and drawing a screaming, “Fuck!”

After Lawrence quieted down, Preston commanded, “Alright, Mary, Eddy, get out and flank them. Lawrence, stay here in case any of them get much further up the hill.”

Mary laid down some covering fire, suppressing a couple of the more aggressive raiders as Eddy got out and into cover. 

As she moved out, she saw a man pop out of cover almost simultaneously. Just as she stepped behind a tree, a spray of gunfire came her way, and she cried out as a bullet tore through her flannel shirt and glanced off her ribs. She felt it grind against the bone, and she almost lost her footing. “Preston, I’m hit!” she called out, and winced as a shot from his laser musket flashed by. It took a moment for her to dig her Stimpak out of her pocket and jab it into her thigh. As the pain began to fade, she saw someone come around to get the angle on her, but of the six bullets she sent his way, none of them found their target. To her relief, though, he hadn’t accounted for Eddy’s angle, and the young man managed to put a bullet in him. That shot alone did not kill him, but he stumbled out of cover, giving Mary the opportunity to put in the fatal blows.

“The bastards are running!” Mary couldn’t tell who shouted it, but when she looked, she found that it was true. Four raiders had started down the hill at a dead sprint. When everyone but Lawrence opened fire, it meant that none of them made it all the way down to the cover of the concrete Olivia station but one, and she with a bullet in her arm. She started reloading her magazine as they regrouped, and hardly even noticed her wound at this point but for the dripping blood.   
*****  
“I shouldn’t have hit you earlier,” Red Tourette said, sitting in a chair by her desk while her chief informant stood in her doorway again, arms raised apprehensively. “Sends a bad message to everyone. It’s just-the base at Walden Pond is a big deal. Ack-Ack and her boys have a good hold in that area, and people around there are going to start forgetting about us if someone doesn’t replace her after Zeus gets me her head. We got any word from Slag over at the Ironworks yet?”

The man in her doorway wrung his hands. It looked a little absurd, the man painted with dried blood and shirtless specifically to show off his musculature, as nervous as a little girl in front of her irritated father. “Yeah. He’s not going to talk, he says. At least, that’s what I assume he meant by sending back out messenger’s mutilated corpse. We got some free iron out of it, though.”

Tourette waved a dismissive hand. “Fuck it. Jacker was an ass and a junkie, anyway. I’ll deal with him after Tom; Slag and his are all the way across the Commonwealth. Now, then. Trudy and her kid, at that diner, did they let Wolfgang and Simone start the chem trade there?”

He shook his head. “No. Wolfgang took a bullet for the diner, but it’s ours and Trudy’s dead. The boy, too.”

“Disappointing. The locals trusted her; I would’ve liked to have her be the one running things. Now, to why I really wanted you here. Where can a girl get a suit of Power Armor?”

The man in her doorway furrowed his brow. “Well, there’ve been some Brotherhood of Steel people in the Commonwealth-”

“I’m sorry, who?”

“Oh. Military types. Not like the Gunners, though. They might be a big issue if they ever start giving a shit about the Commonwealth, but until then, we just got to deal with the occasional patrol. Anyway, they have a lot of Power Armor suits. We can raid one of their patrols, but the Brotherhood are good. A lot better than the Gunners. They’ve got some Power Armor, too, but it’s shit quality-”

“It’s Power Armor, Mattam. It’s better than anything else I’m going to get.” Red Tourette leaned her elbow on her thigh. “Mass Pike Interchange is where the Gunners have set up, right?”

“Right.”

“Alright. Tell me about it.”

“Well, to attack it, it’s all choke points. You’d need some real good individuals to take them on. You could climb the highway up to it, but they’d see you coming, and there’s not enough cover for it. There are lifts that they use to get up and down, but they’re guarded, and only two people can go up at a time. It’s like the construction shit they’ve got going in Boston.”

“Alright. When Zeus gets back with Ack-Ack’s bloody corpse, get him in here for me.” Mattas nodded and turned to leave, but Tourette started speaking again after a moment. “And, Mattas, give me a count on how many Mini-Nukes we’ve got by the time Zeus gets back.” As Mattas left, she sagged back in her chair and sighed. She didn’t cry. She didn’t know how. But the fact that her sister had died and was currently pickling in a beer vat couldn’t not hit her hard.  
*****  
Mary really wished that she’d built a different weapon those months ago when she built her submachine gun out of old pipes and building material. That way, she wouldn’t be at the front right here, right now, leaned up against a bulkhead inside the Olivia Satellite Station with raiders spraying fire at her and Lawrence from below. Just in front of the bulkhead, she could charge out across a catwalk, but with the constant flow of lead, that wasn’t an option. Every so often, Preston would take a shot with his laser musket, but at the moment, they’d come to a stalemate. 

The stalemate only lasted a moment, though, before a homemade firebomb hit the floor a couple feet beside Lawrence. The liquid accelerant splashed across his lower body, and flames sprang to life across his clothes. As his shotgun hit the ground beside him and Lawrence screamed, he batted at his blazing clothes. Given his low speaking voice, Mary had no idea that he could shriek that high. Lawrence took a couple steps out onto the catwalk and fell over, screaming and rolling back and forth, trying and failing to get his soaked and flaming clothes off. His screams echoed through the metal interior of the Olivia Satellite Station and the stench of burning meat filled the air as he expired. Mary couldn’t handle it, and felt bile rise up in the back of her throat. 

When she leaned forward to vomit, bullets ricocheted off of the metal around her, but nothing hit her before she finished her one heave and got back behind the bulkhead. “We got more where that came from, motherfuckers!” one of the raiders shouted. 

“Pull back!” Preston shouted from further back down the hall.

All Mary could think to call back was, “They killed Lawrence!”

“I know! Now pull back, dammit!”

Giving Lawrence’s crackling corpse one last look, Mary sprayed five bullets into the next room to suppress and ran off down the hall. When one of Preston’s laser musket shots streaked past, Mary flinched, but kept running. Preston came with her, and as they passed Eddy, hiding around the corner, Preston paused and said, “Cover us until we get up to the next corner, then I’ll cover you and Mary, and we’ll get out like that. Come on.”

Preston’s plan worked, and Eddy even managed to wing one of the crazy bastards with the a tire iron in his hand. All of them stood with outside the concrete shell of the building, panting, but Preston took cover beneath the sill of one of the glassless windows, keeping an eye on the doorway. Mary and Eddy took his example and joined him. “Alright, guys,” Preston said, turning to the others. “These guys are smarter than I thought. We aren’t giving up, in case you were wondering.”

As a man came through the door, shirtless, Mary turned and lifted her submachine gun. He went down in four bullets, and then rolled back and forth on the ground, choking on his own blood. A woman peeked around the door jamb, and then shrieked as Preston burned a hole through her shirt, breast, and lung with his laser musket. While Mary watched the doorway, she could hear the woman cough and groan as she laid on the ground, barely out of sight. The smell of feces filled the air as the man on the ground between the Minutemen and the doorway experienced his last moments in extreme agony. 

“This is your last chance!” Preston called out. “Throw down your guns and walk out with your hands beside your heads! You might just survive the rest of the day.”

“Fuck you, asshole!” a woman with a rasping voice shouted, just before she charged around the door frame, firing a blast of her shotgun at Preston, forcing him behind cover. Mary shot three bullets her way, but her makeshift metal breastplate deflected two of them, and she didn’t seem to notice the third that tore through her deltoid, just above her collarbone. The second barrel on her shotgun unloaded its payload at Mary.

As the explosion of the gunshot rang in her ears, Mary fell backwards on her ass, feeling searing pain through her scalp and shoulder, and warm blood soaking through her ratty blouse and spattering onto the ground. Her eyes found Eddy, pointing his rifle at her, and after he fired, the woman’s scream rang out. Mary’s weapon used lower caliber bullets, with less powder, as her weapon was not as durable as Eddy’s, which used more powerful rounds. Behind the pain muddling her thoughts, she figured his bullet must have been able to tear through the inch and a half of iron hanging over the woman’s front. 

“Are you alright, Mary?” Preston asked, suddenly kneeling beside her. Before she answered, he looked up to Eddy and said, “Keep them off of us.”

“I think I’ll live,” Mary said, sitting up. As she did so, blood poured out of the wound on her scalp and over her right eye. “We’ve got a job to do.” 

Preston put a hand on her shoulder, keeping her from kneeling and getting back to the watch. “No, Mary, you’re not alright. We already lost one Minuteman today, and I don’t want to lose anyone else. Now, come on, let’s wrap up that one on your head, at least.”

Mary sighed and set her gun down, and set to taking some of the bandages out of a pouch on her belt. She handed the roll of white cloth to Preston and said, “Alright, but hurry up.” It took longer than she wanted or expected for him to wrap up the wound on her head, him having to pull hair aside to make sure he knew where it was. 

As Preston was finishing tying the knot to keep it in place, Mary noticed movement out of the corner of her eye. “There’s too many, Preston!” Eddy shouted, reloading his bolt action rifle. Just as he shouted this, someone leapt over the windowsill beside her, a baseball bat with saw blades attached to the end in his hand. Shouting, he brought it down overhand towards Eddy, who barely managed to save his own life by catching the blades on his left forearm. The young man screamed, falling over as Mary and Preston both scrambled to grab their respective weapons. The raider gave a blood lust filled scream as he brought the brutal weapon down again. Mary emptied her magazine into his chest cavity, all ten of her bullets finding their mark in her target five feet away. The bits of tanned brahmin hide across his form kept some of them from going too deep, but the automatic weapon did its job, and eight of the bullets tore through skin, muscle, organ and bone in his torso. As she emptied the weapon, he slumped against the wall, coughing blood down his front and groaning, his voice leaping octaves up and down. Mary crawled over to Eddy, though, as Preston held off the advance of the last few raiders. 

“Stay with me, Eddy,” she said, clamping hands down on the side of his neck where the raider’s second strike had torn through his flesh. Eddy’s water filled, so, so wide eyes stared up at her as he sputtered blood over his lips, and the sparse hair on his chin he’d been so proud of. “Come on. You’re going to get through this,” Mary pleaded, nodding, and failing to keep his carotid artery closed with her shaking, increasingly blood covered hands. His injured arm, with the cut down to the ulna bone, rose, and wiped one of the tears from her face, leaving a streak of blood behind on her face. Choked, stuttering groans came through, though she could tell that he’d be screaming in pain and frustration if there wasn’t so much blood in the way. Trying to comfort the young man, no, the boy, as much as herself, she held his hand to her cheek. The last thing Eddy registered before he lost consciousness for the last time was the quiver in Mary’s lower lip. 

It didn’t feel real at first, looking at the body. Then the stink of death, of gore and of evacuated bowels, hit Mary’s nose, and she sat on her feet, kneeling, and wailed at the sky. Preston’s strong, dark hand rested on her shoulder, and she sank into weeping, blood covered hands on her face, as some part of her realized that that meant he’d finished off the last of them. 

“Come on,” Preston said, giving her a squeeze as she finished making the noise of grief several minutes later. “Let’s go find that locket.”


	8. On Walden Pond

Around seven o’clock in the evening, Janice stopped in the middle of the cracked asphalt road, and Cait stopped behind her. The Vault Dweller announced, “It’s getting late. We ought to make camp.” After a momentary glance around, she pointed to the left, straight off the road, and started traipsing through the sparse underbrush. 

 

“Sorry, ma’am,” Cait said, the sarcasm in her voice almost literally palpable, “but where in the hell exactly are we going?”

 

“In the nineteenth century,” Janice said, not stopping, “a man named Henry David Thoreau wanted to explore the connection of man with nature. So, he set out to a nearby water source, and built a cabin, and lived there for two years, alone, with nothing but tools for survival and a typewriter. He wrote the book “On Walden Pond” in those two years.”

 

“What the fuck has that got to do with anything?”

 

“We’re going to spend the night at Walden Pond. Back before the War, it was my favorite historical location, and this area is absolutely riddled with American history, so that’s saying something. I haven’t visited it in two hundred and fifteen years. I want to see how it’s doing.” Janice gave a shrug. “Besides, because it’s famous, it’s likely to have some structures around it. An old shop or museum or something.”

 

“Or a bunch of fuckin’ raiders and a Deathclaw to boot.”

 

“Or that.” Janice stopped and turned around to Cait, showing her the laser rifle cradled in her arms. “We’re equipped to handle a little raider gang, Cait. Raiders don’t have the training or tactical expertise that I do, and most don’t have the raw talent that you do.” Despite herself, Cait felt a small spark of pride. After a pause, Janice shifted her weight, looking down at her feet. “Walden Pond is one of my favorite places because it’s where I really got to know my now dead husband, Cait,” Janice said in a lowered voice. “It’s where my child was conceived. It’s one of the most important places in my life. So, I don’t give a shit if there’s twenty raiders and their pet Deathclaw waiting for me there. If things start going to hell, though, if it turns out that we can’t just kill whatever monstrosities that have taken up residence there, then I want you to run.”

 

Cait scoffed. “Oh, come off it. We might get our arses kicked around a little, but I’m not going to let you die. Now come on. Let’s go see what awaits us.”

 

*****

 

The lithe man with the beard drummed his fingers on his scoped B.A.R. as he laid on his belly, watching the entrance to the sewer pipe that dumped into Walden Pond. According to the notes, Tweez and Bear and everyone there used it to enter and exit the structure at the top of the hill to the west, which had an extensive underground portion. A half a minute later, the man on his belly to his left said, “You ought to look at this.”

 

“Look at what?” Zeus muttered, reminding himself of his rifle’s bullet drop and adjusting his aim in case he needed to kill someone walking out. 

 

“Two approaching the pond, and one of them in blue.”

 

Zeus scrambled to adjust his aim, adjusting the scope using the little knob on top. “Holy fucking hell, that’s her.” 

 

“Who?”

 

“The Blue Bitch and her redhead cunt, dumb shit. The fuck are they doing?”

 

“I don’t care.” A moment of silence passed. “If that’s the Bitch, fucking gun her down.”

 

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Zeus said, but still put his crosshairs that little bit above the Bitch. “Say goodnight to half your headaches, Red,” he said, and pulled the trigger. Coming from her front, the spray of red drenched the redhead, mostly. He watched as the woman in the rapidly reddening Vault Suit collapsed onto her ass, and then watched her jolt as he put another bullet in her. 

 

“Movement at the pipe, boss.”

 

Zeus moved his sights again, seeing a man with a homemade rifle trying to take aim on him, about two hundred meters away. He didn’t have to take more than a half second to adjust before knocking him on his back in the shallow water. After putting another bullet in him to make sure he’d stay down, Zeus returned his eyes to the Blue Bitch and her redhead cunt to find them gone. “Catcher, keep an eye out for the Bitch and her friend. Tell me of any movement you see on that horizon whatsoever.”

 

“Got it, boss.”  
*****  
Even as she laid Janice down behind the bushes and fished out her last Stimpak, Cait knew that this wasn’t something that the Vault Dweller could shrug off with a Stimpak and a scream. She saw it in how quickly her friend’s suit was turning brownish red with blood, and in the look that she didn’t have time to process. “Here we go,” Cait said, and jammed the syringe in, through the Vault Suit, into Janice’s right thigh, opposite the thigh that was injured. Kneeling beside Janice, she cradled the woman’s head and said, “You’re going to be fine, love. Don’t you worry that little Pre-War head of yours.”

 

Janice’s smile looked hopeless, and her lower lip quivered as she choked out a sob and a tear slipped out onto her cheek. “No, I won’t, Cait. The Stimpak will slow the bleeding, but I’ll die in a half hour or less.”

 

Holding back her own emotions was a struggle given Janice’s emotionally and obviously physically pained voice. “You don’t know that. You’ve pulled through tougher shit than this, Janice. Hell, you survived getting hit with a goddamned missile. All the bullets in the world ain’t got a thing on you, girl, not after what you’ve been through, not after you survived a fucking nuke going off above your head. You’ll be fine. You’ve got to be. Hell, you haven’t even told me what Kellogg did to you to get you so knackered at him.”

 

After squeezing her eyes shut for a moment and coughing out a little blood, Janice looked up and said, “He stole my son. My baby boy. My Shaun. You find that man, okay? You find him and you send him to Hell so I can show him what he’s done to me.”

 

Cait shook her head repeatedly. “No. No, we’ll find that bastard together, Janice. I’m not promising you any of that shit.”

 

“Please, Cait,” Janice said, a sob distorting her plea halfway through. “Please. I was there at Anchorage, with millions of dead, I know what Stimpaks do. And I know the limit one can do-”

 

“Then I’ll go find you another,” Cait said. “I’m not letting you die like the others, not this time. Them raiders at Walden ought to have some, I’ll go find you one.” As she stood, Janice grabbed at her ankle, but Cait ran off towards the pond, dodging by trees and calling, “And you can’t stop me!” Even as she sprinted towards the pond, she heard a bullet slam into one of the trees she ran past, and she somehow found some extra speed to pour on. As she leapt off of a stone to dive into the pond, she remembered that she left her revolver in her bag back with Janice. As she swam, beneath the surface of the water, she reminded herself of where she saw the sewer pipe was with the binoculars when she and Janice were further up the hill. The irradiated water tickled her skin, so it came as a relief when the water grew more shallow and she was able to climb out into the ten foot tall sewer pipe. 

 

As she climbed up, she felt a bit of muck on the bottom of the pipe, though it didn’t quite smell like human waste. Then, when she looked down, she saw the body, leaking blood into whatever else was there. She stooped and grabbed his homemade rifle, and got moving into the pipe just before a bullet tore through it and screamed just by her head. Hectic, panicked thoughts flashed through her head. When she stepped into the first room, she found a couple of guys waiting for her, one with a rifle like hers, and the other holding a wrench, two feet to her right. Cait barely managed to dodge backwards out of the way of his first swing, and shot three times at the guy with the gun, hitting him twice in the gut and sending him, groaning, to the floor. 

 

The guy’s wrench collided with her right forearm, and she nearly dropped her rifle. Adrenaline and some residual chems cycling through her veins, she stumbled backwards, and bashed his nose in with the butt of the rifle. A dull throbbing pulsed through her arm as he stumbled backwards and shot him, twice, in the head. Cait wasted no time in pacing over to the man writhing on the ground, clutching at his gut wounds and groaning. 

 

Kneeling beside him, she said, “Where are your Stimpaks? Tell me fast.”

 

“Ack-Ack’s gonna rip you to shreds…”

 

Cait pounded on his nose with the butt of her rifle. “Fucking talk, you little shit! Before you die.” For the next ten seconds, all he did was groan, so she blew off his kneecaps. “Now!” With each gunshot, the ringing and the screaming in her ears grew louder.

 

“Jesus God! On the shelf,” he said between sobs, “on the shelf, they’re there.” His violently shaking left hand rose to point at a set of corrugated iron shelves, one of which with a metal, yellow case. Cait put a hole in his forehead with a bullet and went to yank open the chem box. She pulled out a syringe that looked like a Stimpak and slid it into her pocket.

 

As she stepped over the dead man, she commented, “Thanks, asshole.” When she ducked into the sewer pipe again, though, a telltale whirring started up about thirty feet behind her. Knowing what that sound meant, Cait dropped her rifle and bolted. The deafening buzz of the multi-barreled minigun started up, tearing through the thin steel of the pipe like tissue paper as Cait threw her hands up over her head and sprinted. Later, she’d swear that she could feel the bullets coming closer by the time she leapt out into the pond, already soaking wet. 

 

It took her a moment to find a spot of the shoreline that wouldn’t take her forever to climb out through, careful of the sniper, but she’d been exerting herself so much that it felt as though her chest would burst from holding her breath. When she gasped in air as she pulled herself up onto a surface level boulder, Cait could have sworn that the sniper could have heard her. After only ten seconds of sprinting in soaking wet clothes, she fell to her knee and closed her eyes. No shot came. Five seconds later, she opened her eyes, thinking little of it, and continuing on a more direct vector, as the sniper had apparently fucked off.

 

When she came to where she’d left the Vault Dweller, though, she found her gone. Where she’d been, she saw dragging marks in the dirt, and started to follow them, despite her weapon having gone with her apparently stolen satchel.


	9. The Blue Bitch and Her Redhead

Sitting in the chair next to the unconscious woman in the bed, Zeus couldn’t help but think that, outside of her armor, the Blue Bitch didn’t nearly so intimidating. Right then, she was just another naked, bleeding woman whose wrists and ankles had been bound to some bedposts. The still bleeding wounds in her side and leg had stained the bare mattress. Zeus thought that, with a Stimpak injection, she’d wake up before expiring, though. Still, he felt reluctant to do it. Within him, he couldn’t decide if he should cut her throat while she slept, or wait for Red Tourette to arrive to take action. In the Drumlin Diner, the muscled woman in the tight motorcycle leathers, Simone, watched the door behind Zeus while Wolfgang, the ponytail owning man in front of him that ran the chem operation in Drumlin, wiped some of the blood from the woman’s grievous wounds on her ribs and thigh. 

 

Playing a game of Five Finger Fillet in the opposite side of the diner were a couple more raiders. The rest of Zeus’s party had remained behind to try and take out Ack-Ack and her gang. 

 

“How much longer do you think she’s got, Wolfgang?”

 

Wolfgang cocked his head to the side. “Thirty five years, forty. If you use the Stimpak.”

 

“Quit it, smartass, and tell me how much time we’ve got before she bleeds out or wakes up and slaughters us.”

 

Laughing, Wolfgang said, “She wakes up in this state, a woman like this, she won’t do jack shit. Hell, I don’t even think Simone could bust out of these knots.”

 

“Don’t fuckin’ try it,” Simone said from the door. 

 

Wolfgang let out another chuckle before telling Zeus, “Oh, she got a Stimpak in her already. Without another, she’ll last another sixty, ninety minutes, tops.”

 

Zeus scratched his hairy chin and drummed his fingers on the scoped B.A.R. in his lap. “Fuck it. Give her the Stimpak; I want to wait for Tourette to get here to talk to her, and she might be a couple hours or so. So tighten the restraints and stick a Stimpak in her.”

 

“You got it, boss.” Wolfgang, after tightening the knots on the ropes holding her to the bedposts, grabbed a Stimpak from the box on the counter and knelt back by the Vault Dweller. He reached over her to stick it into the outer side of the thigh that Zeus hadn’t shot. “You know, this broad ain’t even hot,” Wolfgang said, sitting back down and chucking the used syringe out the window into the pile of chem refuse they had back there. “How the Hell do you think she got all those people out at Sanctuary to follow her, listen to her?”

 

“She fuckin’ slaughtered everyone she doesn’t like, Wolfgang,” Zeus said, his tone deadpan. “She’s killed about thirty of our people. You’re new to the operation, so you don’t know, but by the numbers, the Blue Bitch is worse than Pickman.”

 

“Heh, nobody’s worse than Pickman,” Wolfgang said. Then he saw the harrowed, serious look on Zeus’s face, one that spoke of friends and sleep lost to this woman. “She’s worse than Pickman.”

 

“Some of us thought she was a ghost,” Zeus said. “Tourette took a few fingernails off of the people that spread that rumor, so we quit pretending like she’s anything but a mortal. You can see for yourself: she bleeds blood just as red as you and me. Do you understand why I’m debating letting her live or not now?”

 

The other raider nodded his head, stiff ponytail wiggling. “Yeah. I already put the Stimpak in her, though. Ought to wake up any second now.” 

 

Muscles tense, Zeus kept waiting. He knew why he didn’t take the extra time to blow her head off. He was scared, scared she’d see his scope glint, and that she’d come for him and do something worse than even Red Tourette could dream up.

 

When Simone spoke, Zeus almost spun and shot her. “Hey, we got somebody coming. Should I turn her away?”

 

“If you can’t get business done quick, send her off. Kill her if you have to, but only if you have to,” Zeus said, repeated what Red hammered into his head when he started his first chemtrade years ago. “We don’t want to scare off customers.” He heard Simone’s heavy boots crunch into the gravel as she stepped away, and then her voice rumble from her barrel chest.

 

“What you want, girl?” 

 

A jittery, Irish tinted voice responded. “I-I-I got the shakes. Need me some Psycho, need it bad. D-don’t got any caps, not a-a-anymore, but I can pay some o-o-other way?”

 

Zeus heard them continue conversing for a moment, but he couldn’t hear what they said. Then Simone called, “Hey, Owen, come watch the door! I’m taking a smoke break.”

 

Groaning in frustration, Zeus snapped at the young man walking from the table with the knife towards the door, “Sit your ass down. Simone! Get back here and turn that junkie bitch away. We have got to be careful!”

 

“Fuck you, old man!” Simone shouted, her voice seeming to sound more distant as she continued. “I haven’t gotten laid since last winter, so go fuck yourself!”

 

Zeus considered getting up and shooting that uppity bitch in the cunt, teach her a lesson about sexuality. He sighed and wrapped his hand tight around the stock of his B.A.R. before looking over to Owen and saying, “Go watch the door, Owen.”

 

Wolfgang wiped away the last bits of blood from the wounds as they finished scabbing over and turned back to Zeus, his eyebrow cocked. “You alright, boss? The Zeus I heard of would’ve beat her half to death and raped her ass. This Blue Bitch that fucking scary?”

 

“Yeah. I need to keep my eye on her. Owen’s young, got good eyes. He can watch the door.”

 

“If you say so.”

 

After a minute of silence passed, Zeus said, “Goddamn my heart doesn’t usually beat this fast. We should kill her.”

 

Wolfgang shrugged. “Why not? It’s not like we’re incapable.”

 

Zeus blinked. He pointed at the unconscious woman. “I’m not as scared of her as I am of Red, I guess. This Bitch, she’d gut me in a heartbeat. Red, she likes to take her time. You haven’t had to clean out her playroom, Wolfgang, but the first time she makes you, you’ll get it. It fucking stinks. So if we kill the Blue Bitch, then Red might get pissed off at us, enough she wants to play. We don’t, then Red gets here, tells us to or not, and we don’t get tortured to death. Capice?”

 

*****

 

Having hated herself steadily more and more for her entire life, Cait almost found it a surprise that letting some raider bitch ride her face didn’t make her hate herself more. She swore to herself, though, that if she woke up with mouth sores tomorrow, she’d punch Janice. 

 

“Come on, girl,” Simone said, her knees in the dirt on either side of Cait’s red head. “At least pretend that you’re more into this than a piece of polished wood. If you don’t manage to get me off, then you aren’t getting shit.”

 

Cait wrapped a hand around her outer thigh and slid the other one towards Simone’s sex, trying to look up with bedroom eyes as she tried to remember what she’d learned about this in the past. Where she learned it, though, made her want to bite this bitch’s clit off.

 

*****

 

When the Blue Bitch’s almost black eyes opened, Zeus shouldered his rifle and said, “Morning, sunshine. Have a good nap?”

 

The Vault Dweller glanced around, and then looked down at her own naked form. She looked surprisingly calm. “I feel like shit, but I’m not dead and my crotch isn’t on fire. You haven’t raped me, then?”

 

Zeus shook his head. “Nope. Not yet. Might later, depending on what Red Tourette decides.” A grin crossed his face as a flicker of fear crossed hers at the mention of Red Tourette’s name. 

 

The woman on the bed laid her head back with a labored sigh. “Well, that’s good. I don’t think I could have survived another pregnancy.”

 

“You think so?” Wolfgang said from where he sat against the wall. “You looked plenty fit to me, I mean, aside from the bullet wounds.”

 

She continued staring at the ceiling. “No, I mean I would’ve killed myself or gotten hopped up on morphine and stabbed myself in the uterus to kill the fuckin’ fetus. Won’t tell you why, though. Guess I need to get used to not telling you shit, if you kept me alive.”

 

“You don’t know that,” Zeus said. “We might have kept you alive just to torment you.”

 

The Vault Dweller shook her head. “Naw. You said that Red Tourette is your leader. She’s got an imperial mindset, as well as a sadistic one. She wants information on how to break into and subjugate Sanctuary more than she wants to hear me scream.”

 

“Where’d you hear that?”

 

Janice looked at him and grinned. Somehow, Zeus knew he’d be seeing that grin every night for the next few weeks. “From the mouths of your comrades as I pulled their entrails from their bloody bodies. You can try to break me. I was tortured by the Chinese army two hundred and twelve years ago, and I watched my husband die, and I’ve killed so many men and women that I can’t tell them apart anymore. I’ve been broken apart and put back together too much for you to do anything, and at this point, I would welcome death if I didn’t want to kill all of you people here so damn much. I guess I’ll just have to settle for a preliminary session of torture before I go to Hell.”

 

Restraining himself from blowing her brains out, Zeus said, “You won’t be disappointed. Red Tourette knows plenty of those medieval techniques for torture. Even if you somehow survive, your body will be ruined forever.”

 

“Fantastic,” the Blue Bitch said, looking back up at the ceiling. “Then, at least, I’ll stop slaughtering so many people.”

 

“So you’ve not been broken so much you still have a conscience. Tourette will fix that.”

 

“No, I haven’t felt bad about any of this since my husband literally lost his mind.” She laughed at her morbid joke, too much for something so simple. Zeus shivered. “I know it’s wrong. But I can’t stop it. I’ve got a goal, but once that’s accomplished I’ll probably just up and die from all the stress.”

 

“Can’t wait.”

 

*****

 

While Simone stood, doing up her belt, Cait sat on the ground, scrubbing at the bits of saliva and sexual effluvia on her chin with the hem of her shirt. “You did a good job,” Simone told her. “Do me a favor and come back by Drumlin sometime, alright? I think we could develop a good partnership.”

 

“I’ll think about it,” Cait said, catching the needle full of Psycho as Simone gently tossed it to her from a belt pouch. “Do me a favor and don’t catch any venereals, alright?”

 

Simone chuckled. “You got it. Are all you redheads so, what’s the phrase, full of life?”

 

“You fuckin’ know it.” 

 

“Heh. See you around.” 

 

As she watched Simone start to walk off, Cait slipped down the waistband of her pants to expose her outer thigh and injected the payload of Psycho into herself. While her heart started hammering and Cait felt adrenaline pulse through her veins, she stood up, a fist sized stone in her hand. As Simone glanced behind her, Cait’s stone came crashing into her face. Cait focused specifically on how Simone’s face deformed while she smashed it in, first the nose, then the eye socket, then the eye itself, and the jaw. Simone hadn’t screamed for more than a second before Cait finally caved in the woman’s forehead, knocking her unconscious. After leaving the bloody stone by the corpse, Cait took the woman’s rusty, ancient revolver from her holster and cocking the hammer back, relishing in the focus and power that Psycho gave her. With the hem of her shirt, she wiped off a bit of gore from her chin and started to work her way up the hill, moving between trees and bushes for cover. 

 

It took every bit of willpower that Cait had, when she crested the hill to see the raider at the door and a couple of people inside, to not immediately open fire. Then the raider at the door keeping watch turned his head to say something, and Cait had no choice; he’d seen her. She lifted her handgun and squeezed the trigger, sending a slug through his head to spray blood on the raider he’d turned to talk to. As they scrambled to recover, Cait charged, taking two shots between the treeline and the diner, and putting down the raider playing with a knife in the diner. 

 

When she crouched down behind the wall beneath the shattered window, she could hear the man she shot sputter and cough as blood flooded his lungs and chest cavity. From the other side of the diner from the dying man, Cait heard shuffling and low voices. She leaned around the door jamb to see what she could just in time for a shotgun blast to send pellets where she had been. She could see the man with the sawed off double barrel standing inside, and as he brought his gun around to where she’d moved, Cait dumped two pieces of hot lead into his torso at high velocity. Wolfgang stumbled backwards into the bar, and sank down it, clutching at his chest and groaning. 

 

“Hey, ya last unlucky bastard! Come out here so I can rip your fuckin’ guts out already!”

 

By way of a response, the bearded man with the rifle popped up over the bar and shot three times through the thin metal wall that Cait hid behind, only one of the bullets grazing her lower back as she rolled over to the other side of the door with the speed and determination that Psycho gave her, just before switching her revolver to her left hand and taking a shot at him. The bullet tore through his head, and Zeus collapsed with a momentary groan and a spray of blood. When Cait didn’t hear him stirring on the floor, she stood up straight. The thought occurred to her that she might not have heard him because of the ringing in her ears, so she hurried over, vaulting over the bar. The man with the beard laid on the floor, though, blood pooling beneath his head. The urge to kick the body came to her, but then she saw Janice lying on the bed, and her revolver hit the floor at the same time her knees did. 

 

Janice gave her a confused look. “Cait? What are you doing here?”

 

The redhead started undoing the rope holding Janice’s left arm outstretched. “Saving your arse, thickhead. Told you I wasn’t gonna let you die.”

 

Somehow, the Vault Dweller laughed. “Christ, girl. I didn’t think you cared that much about me.” After Cait undid her left arm, Janice gave Cait’s shoulder a squeeze. Cait started working on the one holding the leg on the same side. “You don't know how much I appreciate this, Cait, but we really need to hurry. The guy on the ground there said that Red Tourette’s on the way, and she is not someone that I want to meet face to face like this.”

 

Cait finished up with Janice’s haired left leg, and hesitated for half a second as she reached across Janice to work on her other ankle. “Can’t believe I didn't notice how in the buff ya are until now,” she muttered, and said in a louder tone, “They didn't do anything to you?”

 

“Nope. And don't worry about seeing me like this. The Vault Suit hugged me like a lover; there's nothing here you haven't seen before but a bit of hair.” As she spoke, Janice leaned over to start trying to get her right hand unbound using her left. “So, how are you liking the view down there?”

 

Cait scoffed and scowled. “Sorry, but what with the stink, I'm not feeling terribly eager to gawk at you.” After Cait unbound the other woman’s ankle, Janice spread her legs and lifted them skyward, stretching. Cait squeezed her eyes shut and turned away and Janice laughed. 

 

“I’m just stretching, Cait. Like I said, we have to get the fuck out of here. Now give me rifleman there’s boots.” Janice sat up next to Cait, rubbing her wrists as she said this. “They used to be mine, it looks like, and Vault-Tec boots aren’t anything to shake a shoelace at.”

 

As she stood, Cait glanced at her own boots, made with as much duct tape as leather at this point. She thought that they looked pretty snazzy compared to what she saw some people around the Commonwealth wearing on their feet. When she bent to Zeus’s feet to take off the stained, but very much intact black combat boots, she felt the wound on her lower back twist, and Janice said, “Cait, you’re bleeding.”

 

“It’s nothing,” Cait assured her, and pulled off the left boot, tossing it over her shoulder to Janice. “Put that on. Do you think we have time to get you some clothes? I mean, it was hard enough not to stare at your arse with the Vault Suit on.”

 

“I really don’t want to wear any of the blood soaked stuff, and I don’t want to press our luck with time any more than we already have today.”

 

As she stood up and handed Janice the other boot, Cait sighed. “Fuckin’ fine. Then get yer feet on so we can get a move on towards Sanctuary.” While Janice started putting on the boot, Cait grabbed Zeus’s rifle and started looking through his things for spare bullets and magazines. When they started to move to get out of there, Janice grabbed the sawed off shotgun from Wolfgang’s corpse, reloaded it, and gave the other three shells she found on him to Cait, saying, “Hang onto these for me. I don’t feel like figuring out how uncomfortable carrying these things in my colon would be.”

 

That drew a snorting laugh from Cait’s mouth. She waved Janice on, looping the rifle’s strap over her shoulder. “Lead on, girlie. And just so ya know, it’s not because I like lookin’ at your skinny arse. You know the way is all.”

 

Janice got moving, limping ahead of Cait, but said, “If my nudity makes you uncomfortable, I could give you directions from behind.”

 

“Naw,” Cait said. “I want to keep an eye out back here, anyway.”

 

“If you say so.”

 

They continued on for an hour until dusk began to fall. It didn’t look like Janice wanted to stop, but Cait fell behind, huffing as the last traces of Psycho were filtered out of her system. “Hang on there, old girl. We ought to start looking around for some place to someplace to sleep, don’t you think?”

 

Janice stopped and looked back. “If we keep going for a couple hours past dark, we can make it to Sanctuary.” 

 

Cait shook her head. “I really don’t feel safe about that. And besides, don’t you maybe want to find some clothes before you get back home?”

 

“I see your heart’s set on this.” Giving Cait a funny look, Janice thought for a moment. “We can stay in Concord tonight. Another historical spot.”

 

“Sure hope this one isn’t full of raiders, too.”

 

“It’s not. I killed everyone there months back, and go back and forth every now and again to make sure that no one’s tried to take it back. It’s only a twenty, thirty minute walk from Sanctuary, so I make sure that it’s safe.”

 

“So it’s chock full of corpses, then?”

 

“No. I burned all the bodies.”

 

*****

 

A splitting headache greeted Zeus as he opened his eyes. The oil lantern in the corner of the little steel and wood shack seemed to glow with the fury of a thousand suns, and sitting in the corner opposite him, he saw a woman with the deformed visage of a human on her iron mask’s face. “You’re not dead yet, Zeus,” he heard her say, and after a moment, recognized the voice as Red Tourette’s.

 

He blinked slowly, and hard, and finally felt the bandage wrapped around his now bald head. “How? That Irish bitch shot me in the head.”

 

“The bullet only grazed your skull. We used three Stimpaks to make sure you’d pull through.”

 

“I suppose I’ll have to pay for all that effort, huh?”

 

“Yes. But through service, not pain. I don’t think that your screams will please me as much as you bringing me that bastard Tower Tom’s head.” Zeus blinked again. Did he hear some emotional instability in Red’s voice?

 

“How? When?”

 

“I don’t care how, and as soon as you’re able to run and shoot straight without vomiting. You know what? If you bring me him alive, then you’ll get whatever you want. Anything in the world, you name it, I’ll bring it to you.”

 

Zeus closed his eyes and turned his head back towards the ceiling. Turning and looking hurt too much. “I’ll do it. But, if you don’t mind, could you tell me what’s bringing on this fresh wave of hatred towards the big man?”

 

“He kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered my sister. I’m going to drive him insane. You’d best believe it.”

 

“The conviction in your voice has me convinced,” Zeus said in a slow voice. He didn’t sound condescending, but rather tired and focusing on his words so as to forget about the pain for a few seconds. “I’ve got an idea as to how to do it, too. His brewery is on the southwest side of Boston, am I right?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“There are some smaller Super Mutant camps nearby it. I could probably kite some of them to attack Beantown Brewery without losing many men at all. The mutants will slaughter the majority of Tom’s forces as then, to make sure we get Tom out for you, we attack the Super Mutants from behind, finish them off before they can get all the way to Tom. Then all we have to do it subdue him and drag him to you.”

 

“It sounds like a good plan. And death by Super Mutant is terrible enough that, if you fail to grab Tom before they kill him, I might just let you live.”

 

“I would very much appreciate that, miss Tourette. DId anyone else from Drumlin Diner survive?”

 

“Wolfgang did. I cut off his little fingers for his incompetence.”

 

“And me?”

 

“Bring me Tom, and you could have my little fingers.”

 

*****

 

Now that the danger had passed and the Psycho had gone from her body, Cait very much appreciated the nude form of the Vault Dweller as they made camp in the living room of an abandoned town house on the southern end of Concord. They’d made a fire pit in the middle of the hardwood living room’s floor out of the back of the decrepit television set, and with all the wooden furniture, it didn’t take long to get a fire going that didn’t produce enough smoke to hurt them but warmed them enough that they wouldn’t perish from exposure.

 

Cait sat against a wall, rifle propped up on the wall beside her, watching Janice feed some paper to the fire to stabilize it. More specifically, Cait watched the somewhat saggy breasts on Janice’s chest with the puffy nipples. After she finished with the fire, Cait stopped ogling her. “So,” Janice said, walking over to sit down at the wall beside Cait. “You wanted to stay here instead of Sanctuary with all its people. So, spill. Tell me what’s up.” The Vault Dweller kept her knees tucked up towards her chest, and Cait felt a bit more comfortable with looking at her while talking without those silly puffy nipples distracting her.

 

“Well, I wanted to talk with you. Ya know, your elders are supposed to know more than you and all that shite.”

 

Janice let out a scoffing laugh. “You know, if I hadn’t been frozen in Vault 111 for two hundred and ten years, then I’d only be thirty two. Or thirty three now, I guess.” After blinking a moment, Janice looked down at her right forearm. “My Pip-Boy’s gone. Huh. Now I don’t know the date anymore.”

 

“Oh, pshaw. You don’t need that crap weighing down your aim and makin’ ya stand out.”

 

“If you say so. Anyway, you said you wanted to talk. So talk.”

 

Cait took a deep breath and let it out. “Well, it has to do with my savin’ your arse back there at Drumlin. I guess you kind of know about my drug habit, huh?”

 

“I do. While I disagree with it, it would be a little hypocritical of me to say much about it.”

 

“Anyway, I use them performance enhancers, mostly. Don’t look at me like that; I’m not some old bag of bones who has trouble gettin’ it up. And I’m a woman, if you haven’t noticed.” Janice’s stupid grin faded, and Cait continued. “I knew I needed Psycho or Jet if I wanted to kick all them raiders’ arses back there. So I walked up, both to see how many people were there, and to ask for some Psycho. I said that I’d give some sexual favors or other to whomever would give me some.”

 

“Right. I thought I heard you talking.”

 

“Right. What I didn’t expect was this big woman by the door to take me up on it. Anyway, we went down the hill into the woods, and I kept thinking to myself, as soon as she turned her back, as soon as she let her guard down I’d strangle the bitch. But it was me that let my guard down, and this bitch was real big, and I could see that she was tough. And scary. So I said to myself, when her pants are down, I’ll get her then. But then her hands were on me, holding my hands to my sides while she kissed me, and then I was on my back. I didn’t even remember her tripping me.” Cait snapped as she said, “And then her pants came off like that and she got her knees on either side of my head. Goddamn was she strong.”

 

Cait pinched the bridge of her nose as Janice wrapped an arm around her shoulders and leaned her head on Cait’s shoulder. “And I just feel terrible, because I know, if I weren’t the junkie cunt that I am, I could’ve killed her. I’m good. You said so. But I can’t fight worth a half a shite without bein’ on somethin’ anymore, and it’s all my fault. Ya know, I have hardly an issue with decapitatin’ someone or torturing them for information, or looting corpses in fuckin’ mass graves, but for some reason munchin’ this bitch’s carpet got to me. And I think it was because I was doin’ it for someone else. I’ve had to do that sort of thing just to survive before, but this, this was optional, and I just can’t stop thinkin’ about it.”

 

Squeezing the arm around Cait’s shoulders, Janice scooted up closer to her. “Cait, you saved my life. I’ll never forget that, and you’d better believe it. I’ve just got one question for you. Why’d you do it?”

 

Cait sat there in silence for a few seconds, taking deep breaths of the slightly smoky air. “Because I give a shit about you. The thing is, I don’t know if you’d do it for me. That’s tearin’ me up.” As she said this, Janice pulled back a little, looking into Cait’s eyes. 

 

“Cait, I’m sorry if it seems like I don’t care. I do care. The thing is, we’re going to be fighting some really dangerous people soon. If I let myself care a whole lot about you, though, Cait, it'll mean I fight poorly. It’ll mean I get irrational if you die.” 

 

For some reason, what Janice said hit Cait hard. “So what you're saying, Vault Dweller, is that you're scared of commitment, huh?”

 

“No, that's not it. There's also the fact that my husband died months ago. You’re the first person I could even consider, Cait. Let's put this off until after we’ve killed Kellogg, ok?”

 

Cait sighed. “Ok.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I appreciate every reader, but I appreciate feedback more. Please, leave kudos and/or a comment if you liked it, and if you'd care enough to leave a comment telling me why you didn't like it if you didn't, I'd appreciate it. But hey, it's your life. You don't have to do anything.


	10. Shit Creek

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's some fucked up shit in this one, guys. Be warned.

Ian’s wounds had nearly healed, as only a dull stiffness bothered his leg as he sat up over the edge of the mattress, hairy, bare knees tucked up a little. While leaning his elbows on his knees, he took a glance behind him, reassuring himself of Angie’s presence there. After stepping out of the little one room shack, Ian emptied his bladder round back of it. Stars, in their multitudes, reflected in the little puddle of piss. Gunfire crackled in the distance over the Boston rooftops. His girl was asleep five feet away, making that little snoring type sound that he just thought was adorable. The scenery, combined with the satisfaction of just having emptied his bladder, made Ian wonder why that moment couldn’t last forever.

 

In the morning, Angie woke him up, kicking his shoulder with a cardboard shoed foot to his nearly healed shoulder and saying, “Ian, get dressed. We need to move as soon as possible.”

 

“I got it, I got it,” he said, sitting up and grabbing his jeans from where they’d pooled on the floor beside their mattress on the floor. While donning them, he said, “The gunfire wasn’t this close before dawn.” After a moment of near silence as he buttoned up his pants, he continued. “Yeah, and they were different guns at night. Laser guns with the bullets.”

 

As Angie loaded her homemade bolt action rifle, having already dressed, she told him, “Well, it’s getting closer, and gunfire doesn’t discriminate between who they’re trying to kill and bystanders, so let’s get the fuck out of here already.”

 

Ian slid his arms into his leather jacket, looped his bag over his shoulder, and grabbed his laser musket, which he’d looted off some corpse behind a Super-Duper Mart the previous night. A slim little cord connected the laser musket to one of the fusion cells in the canvas messenger bag. “I agree. And I’ve got the holotape for Tom in my bag, so let’s go.” He slid his shoes on as Angie stepped out of the shack. 

 

The pair of them had slept in a shack by a highway, which went low into the ground before running into a tunnel. They hurried away from the highway southwest, the direction of the Beantown Brewery. As Ian stopped at the end of an alleyway, he held up a hand to Angie, looking up and cocking his head as he glanced up and down the street. “The gunshots. They’re getting closer. Come on; we need to move.”

 

“Agreed.” They continued on, racing through alleyways and darting between pieces of cover in any open streets they had to cross. The two of them realized that, even as they moved as quick as they safely could, they found the gunshots getting closer and closer to them. “Ian, it’s like the fight is coming to us, or for us or something.”

 

“I doubt it,” Ian said, ahead of Angie as he broke off from the street they’d been following to charge into the dead forest, the husks of trees still remaining. “You never know, though,” he assured her, his breath starting to come to him with more difficulty. “Let’s leg it for the last little bit; Beantown isn’t far.”

 

“That’s true,” Angie said, starting to gain on him, “but if they’re having a gunfight, then they’re fighting for their lives; they won’t slow down for us.”

 

“Yeah.” They kept sprinting as long as they could, their breathing growing progressively shorter, as the both of them focused on the forest floor, making sure that they wouldn’t injure themselves on anything. When they broke away from the treeline to stop in the parking lot in front of Beantown, the gunfire had gotten farther away, and they both paused, hands on their knees as they panted for a half minute or longer, Ian couldn’t tell. Ian said between breaths, “We’d better… tell Tom and the boys… to get ready for a fight… I think.”

 

“Yeah.” Ian and Angie still stood there panting until they could drag themselves inside, Ian’s leg wound throbbing again. “We should really have someone outside keeping watch,” Angie said as she pushed open the door to the brewery. 

 

A skinny woman, no more than twenty, with a rusty old 10mm pistol looped into her belt, laughed as they walked in. “Why’re you two all sweaty? You weren’t fucking right out there in the parking lot, were you?”

 

Angie shook her head. “No, Di, you dumbass. We were running. There were people, a gunfight moving in our direction. We need to get ready.”

 

Di nodded her half shaven head, taking her pistol from her belt and moving the slide back and forth several times to make sure it wouldn’t jam just now. “Yeah, probably. Might be somebody running from a Deathclaw, trying to kill it while they’re running. Do you two have any idea what it could be?”

 

“No,” Ian said. “Now come on. We need to go talk to Tom. He’ll know what to do. He always knows what to do.”

 

The three of them stepped into the main brewery chamber, the floor of which had become a shanty town for raiders. About thirty raiders followed Tower Tom, the majority of them strong young men and women with guns they made and morals that didn’t matter much to them. In the center of the shanty town was the ring, made from scrap pieces of wood and corrugated metal. In the ring, potential new raiders and people who’d done wrong by the gang would compete to see who gets to live. New recruits came from people they’d captured who wanted to join and people that had few other options, or were just so broken by the world that they’d gone mad and needed a way to make a living. Tom claimed that this was one of few ways to make sure the gang remained strong. Plus it was fun to watch. 

 

Ian remembered his first fight in the ring. Tom’s gang had raided his caravan, so Ian wanted to join up. They set him up with a person who’d proven themselves a coward, running away from a fight. Ian didn’t think he fought like a coward, but still managed to drive a knife through his throat. He touched his forearm, where the “coward” had given him a scar during that fight. During the fight, Ian claimed the other man’s black leather jacket, and it’d become something of a trademark for him, at least within Tom’s gang. 

 

As they waited for the catwalk to extend to where Tom had taken up residence, the administrator’s office, Di said to Ian, “So, did you get the holotape Tom wanted?”

 

Iam pulled it out of his bag, sifting through some extra fusion cells to find it. When he pulled it out, he twiddled it between his fingers in front of Di. “The Silver Shroud, Episode 0: Origins of Shadow.” He grinned wide at her as she let out a scoffing laugh. “I know, it’s crazy. Tower Tom is in charge, though, he likes it, and he’s giving me one of his fancy fuck riot helmets for it, so I got it for him. Plus he’d probably rip my tongue out for saying the word no to him.”

 

The catwalk stopped extending, the racket it created no longer masking Ian and Di’s conversation, so they both stopped talking, afraid of what Tower Tom might say if he caught them saying these things about him. Tom started across the catwalk, his immense size making it creak beneath his feet. “You’ve got the tape!” he exclaimed, plucking it from Ian’s fingers.

 

“Yeah,” Ian said, but Angie stepped up in front of him.

 

“There’s people coming towards the Brewery,” Angie told him. “Lots of them, I think, and they’ve got guns. We need to lock this place down.”

 

Tom nodded and stepped into his office for a moment before coming back out with a megaphone. Di, Angie, and Ian all instinctively took a step back from him. His booming voice came out amplified many times over, loud enough for the dead people in the ground below them to hear it. “Attention, Tower Tom gang! We’ve got attackers incoming, so some of you go up on the roof, and the rest of you point your guns at the door. Every person that kills one of those sorry shits gets a free hit of Jet!” He lowered the megaphone and looked to Ian. “Head up onto the roof. Angie, too. I trust you both, so don’t die today.”

 

He shoved them on their way, and Angie and Ian both took off towards the staircase that led up to the roof.

 

*****

 

During all of Janice’s early business in Sanctuary, which included: donning a flannel shirt and some jeans, grabbing a fresh backpack, and getting a heavily modded 10mm pistol out of some trunk in her house, Cait stuck to Janice’s side like glue. When people asked her name, she gave it, and tried not to say anything else, often coming off snarky and rude. She kept waiting for things to go wrong, for someone to pull the wool off of her eyes and show her the dirty underbelly of the town. When Marcy Long called her a, “Junkie Irish bitch,” behind her back, Janice had to physically restrain her from strangling the Long woman to death. 

 

A minute later, as they continued walking through the suburb, Cait grabbed Janice’s upper arm, stopping her, and asked, “Alright, so tell me the deal. Why’s that Long cunt get to act like one, and I don’t get to say or do anything back? It doesn’t make sense to me.”

 

“She recently lost her son and damn near everyone she ever knew, Cait,” Janice said, looking properly angry at Cait for the first time. “And I know you haven’t had it easy either, but you shouldn’t say anything about her immature behavior when you’re huffing Jet and sticking Psycho in your veins every time I turn my back.” At Cait’s widened eyes, Janice continued. “Yeah, I know. You’re not as sneaky as you like to think you are. Now, we’re about to talk to someone who handles people who can’t control themselves quite well, but I don’t handle that very well, and next time, I might not just hold you back. Now come on.”

 

As Janice pulled away from her towards the partially collapsed house they’d stopped in front of, Cait found herself with more questions than she started with, as well as some confusion as to Janice’s mood surrounding her. She didn’t talk like that to anyone else in Sanctuary. Of course, there probably weren’t any other junkie Irish bitches who have killed probably somewhere around two hundred people and didn’t feel a lick of remorse, but still!

 

When cait caught up to Janice inside the house, she found her hugging some guy of African descent with an eighteenth century style longcoat on over his ratty tee shirt and slacks. A quite nice looking laser musket sat on the desk behind him, and Cait started wondering if she’d be able to get away with stealing it when she finally started understanding what the guy was saying. “I’m glad you’re back, general,” he said, pulling back with his hands on her shoulders. “Things have been going to hell around here. Blake Abernathy’s daughter was killed, and two of the four people I took to go avenge her followed her into the grave, but we wiped out the gang that did it. Marcy Long insulted one of the younger girls, and her mother wanted to punish her, and - just - I’m glad you’re back.”

 

“It’s good to be back,” Janice said, and gave him another quick hug before pulling back. She held a hand towards Cait and said, “This is Cait. She came with me after losing her job at the Combat Zone when I killed her audience. On the downside, some gang or other forced me to ditch my Power Armor. Cait helped to kill all of them.”

 

“Meanin’ I did most of the work,” Cait said with a little grin. “Janice here was fuckin’ impressive in the Combat Zone, though. Stompin’ in in your Power Armor, just razin’ the place to the fucking ground like the Angel of Death or something.”

 

Janice let a little grin slide over her shoulder. “Oh, so I’m an angel now?”

 

Cait’s ruddy face went tomato red over the course of several seconds as she opened and closed her mouth repeatedly, only letting out a syllable at a time. The man in the longcoat and Janice shared a laugh for a quarter of a minute before Cait found her tongue, waved an angry hand and said, “Oh, shut up, you! Can we get to business or something already?”

 

Janice let her laughter and smile die over the course of a second, and the man in the longcoat followed suit. “I suppose you ought to know, Cait. This is Colonel Preston Garvey of the Minutemen, who leads them when I’m away on business. It’s more of an incidental thing, my role with the Minutemen,” she said, shooting Garvey a look over her shoulder. “I’m not here to put out all of your fires in Sanctuary, Preston. I’m here, actually, because I’m looking to start a few.”

 

Preston blinked a couple times. “W-what do you mean by that?”

 

“The Gunners have a camp at the Mass Pike Interchange. They have information I want, and you know that if I try to treat with them, they’ll bleed us fucking dry. So, I want your help and the help of the Minutemen to put them in the dirt where they belong.”

 

“That’s a big favor, general,” he said, “but you are the general and what you say goes. If you intend to command us all to congregate, then I can get to Fort Independence within two days and give the order through the radio there. Where should we all meet?”

 

“Concord,” Janice said. “At the museum there. And you don’t have to summon all of them; if this goes poorly and Mass Pike Interchange turns into another Quincy, then the Minutemen won’t be done for.”

 

Preston lifted a hand up, his eyebrows furrowed beneath his wide billed hat. “Yeah, but I just got to ask you, general: why don’t we just grab one of them and interrogate them, if it’s information you’re after. There’s a lot less risk in terms of people and it just seems a lot more efficient.” 

 

“Where would we interrogate them, Preston?”

 

“Here.”

 

“No. We can’t. The Gunners would follow us, and the civilians of Sanctuary would see war. I can’t risk that; I won’t. If we take the gunner to a safe place near Mass Pike Interchange, that will just mean less time that they have to chase us to find us and kill us. Preston, there’s going to be a fight with the Gunners at Mass Pike Interchange, and I don’t want us to be the ones getting attacked unprepared, back on our heels.”

 

Preston took a breath and sighed. “General, the Gunners will be prepared. They’re always ready for a fight. We could beat them, sure, we’ve got numbers, but they’re so dug in there our people would die, a lot of them. By my estimates, probably around fifty. If it’s information you’re after, what’s so damned important that you’d risk all those lives to get it?”

 

“It’s the only lead I have on the man who killed my husband and stole my son. And I’m sick of biding my time, Preston. I’ve been biding my time for months, making no progress, finding out nothing about this man except that he lived in Diamond City years ago, likes San Francisco Sunlights, and he’s a mercenary. Now I’ve finally got a lead, I know where to go to get this information, but I can’t do it.” A sob started at the back of her throat, but Janice caught it, bringing a hand up to her mouth. “And I know it’s selfish, but goddamn it I don’t know what else to do.”

 

Preston latched a hand onto her shoulder. “Look, Janice, I know it’s shitty, and I know this is hard, but I lost my family too, back at Quincy. And I’m not asking you to take the Minutemen to South Boston to lose a hundred lives to avenge those lost already. Janice, we can’t do this right now. Not without a valid reason. Now, I know that they don’t give a crap about each individual gunner, not much, so really the only option you’ve got here is to take one of them and interrogate them. I can, in good conscience, help you with that. At least, so long as you don’t get too carried away with the interrogation.”

 

Cait finally spoke up. “Janice, I’ve known a couple of Gunners in my time, and they don’t give two shits about each other, like Preston said. They’re mercs. They won’t chase us as long as we make it clear that they’ll lose more than they’ll gain.”

 

Looking more emotionally stable now, Janice nodded. “Alright. We can do that. We’ll take the one of them we grab to a shack nearby that I know. No one lives there, unless some raiders or squatters have claimed it. We can take him there. Alright. I’m going to take a few Minutemen with me when I go, and we’ll be back within three, four days, probably.”

 

Preston nodded, but Cait objected. “Excuse me, but are we headin’ right back out into the hellhole? Fucking Christ, woman, it’s like you hate luxury like this.”

 

Janice turned back around. “It’s not that I hate luxury. It’s that I hate Kellogg. It’s that I want to be back here to relax in three days with Kellogg’s head on my nightstand. We’re going to grab some weapons, we’re going to grab some water, and then we’re gone. The question is: are you coming with?”

 

“Hell fuckin’ yes I am!”

 

*****

 

Standing on top of the Beantown Brewery, laser musket cranked and ready to go, Ian had a conflict of interest in his head. He wanted to keep an eye on Angie, so her up there with him should have comforted him, but he also wanted to keep her as far away from the fighting as possible, so her up there with him should have worried him. He decided to ignore those feelings; besides, trying to protect the sadistic woman would likely have just turned out with him on his knees and a whip or something in her hand. 

 

Now with an erection to contend with as well as a rapidly approaching gunfight, Ian’s heart could only have been beating faster if he’d already begun the fighting or the fucking. “Ian,” a man said behind him. 

 

Ian didn’t turn around, wanting to keep eyes on the west, where he’d heard the gunfight earlier. The gunfire had died down, though. “What is it?”

 

“Take a look southward.”

 

Ian turned to his left, where the man was pointing. Movement between buildings caught his eye, only a couple hundred yards away. Finally, he realized what the movement was. “Super Mutants. God fucking dammit. God fucking forgive me.” He shouldered his rifle, and started trying to draw a bead on a mutant, listening to the other people talking about doing the same thing. He glanced over his shoulder at Angie. She winked at him, and he at her before looking back down the sights of his musket.

 

*****

 

Repeatedly flicking the safety on her rifle on and off as she walked, Cait asked Janice, “So, how much farther have we got to walk?”

 

“Couple miles. Mass Pike isn’t too far.” 

 

“If ya say so.” After another couple of minutes of walking through the woods, the two of them flanked by four Minutemen, Cait asked, “So, you Minutemen, what kind of training ‘ave ya got?”

 

A man on her left spoke up. “Mostly whatever we give ourselves. Besides, you don’t survive long in the Commonwealth unless you can fight. Gary, tell us about the time you killed that Yao Guai, over near Cambridge.”

 

Gary, a man with a pistol made from some pieces of wood, some screws, some springs, and a few lengths of pipe, said, “Yeah, it was over by Cambridge. I was picking through this pile of rubble for old shit, just like usual, and I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. This big fucking black bear came wandering down the road, missing like seven ninths of its fur, and just as soon as I turned to look at it, it charged me.”

 

Cait tuned out the details of the fight, the blood rushing in her ears from her lingering Jet high making it easy. She left the safety off and slung her rifle around her shoulder. As they came out of the woods, making their way towards the overpass on the horizon, Cait pulled a cigarette out of her backpack and stuck it between her teeth. A quick strike of a match from an ancient matchbook, and she had a light for it. The relaxing effect of the cigarette counteracted the slight jitteriness offered by the Jet, and people didn’t usually give her sideways looks for huffing on a cigarette instead of an inhaler full of Jet. 

 

Halfway there, Janice’s voice pulled Cait from her reverie. “Cait, take a look through your scope. There ought to be some people at the bottom at an industrial elevator beneath the windmill. One of them is the one we’re going to interrogate.”

 

“You got it, boss,” Cait said, stopping as the others did as well, and lifting up her rifle to eye level. It didn’t take a half a minute of scanning to spot a little wooden structure hidden behind a glaringly yellow industrial elevator. She tweaked the scope and took another puff. With a closer view, she could see the two men and the woman at the structure. “Three buggers in a mini-tower behind the industrial elevator. Two of ‘em have got laser pistols, and the chick has a B.A.R. like this one in my hands. Minus the scope.”

 

“What’s their armor look like?” one of the Minutemen asked.

 

“Hang on, I was just about to get to that, so stem yer bleedin’ heart already. Lady over there has got on an army lookin’ breastplate, the men have got shin guards and helmets. Rifle girl has also got a shin guard. They all lookin’ pretty hungry, so if we get close we c’n overpower them.” She lowered her rifle and looked to Janice. “Up to you, though, Janice.”

 

“Hang back here with the rifle, Cait,” she told her. “The Minutemen and I are going to sneak up a bit closer. Cait, I want you to start in half a minute after we get going down there, and start by shooting the woman in the unguarded leg. We’ll probably have enough time to smash the control panel on the elevator before people can start coming down out of the camp up on the overpass then. Alright, people. Let’s move!”

 

*****

 

Crouching behind the air exhaust vent, Ian looked over to where Angie laid on her belly, inching forward to take pot at the Super Mutants shots every so often. Ian himself would stand slightly to shoot between cranks. Luckily for him, when the Super Mutants managed to figure out where he was and turn the steel of the exhaust vent to Swiss cheese, all he had to do was wait, and to the Super Mutants, he might as well have been half a mile away thanks to their lack of patience. Unfortunately, while the Super Mutants lacked for intelligence and patience, they didn’t lack for much else. Their one missile launcher had gotten off a rocket that tore a chunk out of the top of the Brewery and killed all the other rooftop persons besides Ian and Angie, the both of them having moved to cover on either side of the little chasm. He and she struck the missile launcher at the same time, ruining it. 

 

When Ian ducked back behind the exhaust vent to react to the hail of bullets, he looked down into the Brewery, taking a moment to recognize that some of the silhouettes moving around and shooting in the relatively dim light in there bore the massive stature of Super Mutants. He cursed at himself for his incompetence. Super Mutants were inside the Brewery, slaughtering his people, and he didn’t even notice. A bellowing Super Mutant’s voice join the cacophony of battle as he blasted one of them with a laser beam. 

 

A man wailed, higher and louder than men wail unless they’re enduring incredible torment. Ian knew who it was. He was watching the man’s arms be torn from his torso, his forearms crushed between massive, green fingers. Ian tried to save him, cranked again and pulled the trigger, but no laser beam shot forth. “Shitting fuck fuck,” Ian muttered, and pulled the cord running down to his satchel out of the fusion cell, tossing the little yellow cylinder over his shoulder before plugging it into a different one. By the time he managed to crank once and point his musket, though, the Super Mutant had moved on to chase down a woman reloading a shotgun. Ian charred away a chunk of the mutant’s flesh, slowing it down and giving the woman just enough time to turn around and blow its head off with a spray of buckshot. Then a different Super Mutant broke a baseball bat against her head, turning the back of her skull into a spray of gore. She stumbled forward, a keening scream cutting through the gunshots, and Ian knew there was no way to pull a victory out of his ass. 

 

Angie called out to him. Ian turned his head, and realized he’d sunk down to sit with his back against the vent. “Ian! I’m out of ammo.”

 

He grinned at her. Goddammit, he grinned at her, and he didn’t know why. Maybe it was the fact that he’d be able to get away from all of this, from the memory of Tom slaughtering his family, from the knowledge that he loved a woman who deserved to die. Or, if they somehow survived, they could run away. Go to New York City and be scavvers or something. He didn’t know why. He just grinned. 

 

*****

 

Cait let the cigarette fall from between her teeth as she took the first shot. An echo from the shot rang out, sounding over miles. When she pulled her rifle back down from the kickback, she saw, through the scope, the woman writhing on the ground, clutching her lower left leg. More gunshots began to ring out, and Cait watched as the gunner man that rushed to her aid was slain in a hail of bullets. As he sputtered and coughed what blood wasn’t leaking out of his chest and legs, the woman crawled over to him. Cait could hear her anguished, mourning screams even two hundred or so yards away. As she looked around, she saw Janice smashing the control panel on the bright yellow elevator with the butt of a rifle, and a gunner man on the other side of the little wooden structure that the Gunners had all been standing around. 

 

She had no clear shot, but the Jet had faded from her system enough for her to be able to accurately guess where he was behind the flimsy bit of cover. After pulling the trigger again, she looked through the scope, and saw him running away from the wooden structure, clutching a wound in his side that was rapidly dampening his shirt. Before he reached more cover, though, one of the Minutemen landed a shot on him with a laser musket, sending him to the ground. His bloodied hands clawed at the ground, trying to move him or just trying to do something, no matter the purpose, but he did nothing more than crawl a couple of feet before expiring. 

 

Cait watched as Janice went to lift up the woman with the injured leg, but the woman pulled a knife as she reached down. She managed to get a cut on Janice’s forearm through her flannel shirt, and Cait felt rage boil inside of her. To make sure she wouldn’t kill her, Cait flipped on her rifle’s safety. Janice wrestled the knife away from the woman within a moment, and punched her several times in the face, breaking her nose. Cait thought that she saw a tooth or two come out of her mouth with the bit of blood that did, but couldn’t be sure. She lowered her rifle and started hurrying over to where Janice was hoisting the dazed woman onto her shoulder. 

 

Laser fire started raining down from above. Cait looked up, seeing Gunners pointing rifles and pistols out of the fortifications that they had up on the overpass. When she brought her gaze back down, she saw Janice running towards her with the woman over her shoulder, the Minutemen giving the Gunners a couple of shots as they all retreated. 

 

They ran for a while, wordless, northward for about five minutes. They met the ruined treeline again, and Janice led the way to a squat, one room shack in the woods. Cait was huffing and sweating by the time they stepped in and Janice slumped the semi-conscious woman down into the rickety chair in the room. The woman had been muttering curses and threats the whole way down. When Janice put the woman down, she stepped out to the Minutemen, and told them, “Keep watch for me. If you see anyone out there in the woods, then you come and report to me, got it?”

 

“Yes, general,” one of them said, and Cait let out a scoffing laugh at her title before turning around to the woman in the chair flashing her a bloody smile. 

 

Up close, as she drank from a canteen, Cait could see that the woman’s nose had been badly broken, blood having poured out from it, and tears having leaked from her eyes. Both lips had been split, and while Cait couldn’t see any missing teeth, a couple of them wiggled when she spoke. She wore ratty hair, half shaven and the other half short, hanging limply off her scalp. Cait’s shot had torn through her shin bone, the bullet still lodged inside of the leg. Her tee shirt’s collar and front were spattered with blood and snot. 

 

Janice stepped in and shut the door behind her, much more gently than Cait first expected. Then she saw the reason why: the cut running down the outside of Janice’s forearm. “Janice, you’re hurt,” Cait said, stepping forward and reaching for a Stimpak, but Janice lifted a hand. 

 

“I’ll be fine, provided it doesn’t get infected, Cait.” Despite the woman’s words, Cat could hear the pain and physical exhaustion in her friend’s voice. Janice’s own mid length, black hair had been plastered to her forehead with sweat, and Cait pointedly kept herself from looking at the sweat dripping down her sternum, made visible by the two or three undone buttons at the top. As Janice stepped past, she noticed the knife that had previously belonged to the Gunner woman clutched tight in Janice’s hand. 

 

“Welcome to shit creek, girlie,” Janice said, crouching in front of the gunner woman who still couldn’t seem to muster the strength or will to fight. “Now, I heard all your threats on the way over, and I know that the Gunners might be coming for me, but there’s a pretty big chance that they won’t be, as you don’t really give a shit about each other. And yes, I killed your friends, and I’ll kill you just as quickly. Who knows, I might even turn you loose if you cooperate and answer my questions.”

 

“Go fuck yourself,” the woman said, the words wet and slurred by pain, concussion, and blood. “I ain’t telling you shit.”

 

Janice nodded, and looked over her shoulder at Cait with a “what can you do” expression on her face. Then she turned back around and jammed her knife into the woman’s shoulder joint, twisting and grinding at the tendons and ligaments therein. The woman screamed and writhed in the chair, and her uninjured arm went to grab Janice’s arm, but Cait stopped her, grabbing her arm. Still, she felt the woman’s shitty excuses for shoes kicking at her shins, only further fuelling the flame of hatred that Cait had for her. Even as Cait restrained her, though, Janice continued twisting the knife, changing angles to ruin her shoulder joint as much as possible. When, at last, she stopped a half a minute later, Cait noticed fresh tears cutting through the blood all over her face.

 

Janice pointed the knife at the woman’s chin, the blade dripping gore, and said, “You’re going to tell us everything that you know about the mercenary known as Kellogg. Bald, Caucasian, scar over one eye, carries a revolver.” The woman stopped struggling and slumped against the back of the chair, so Cait let go of her arm. “Where is he?”

 

Between choked sobs, the gunner woman moaned, “I don’t know! Ok, I don’t know shit about Kellogg! We were having trouble killing him, so boss gave up on him.”

 

“Where is he?” Janice growled, placing the knife under her chin. “You know more than you think, and you know that I can dig it out of you. I could dig the marrow out of your bones and show it to you, do you want that, bitch?”

 

The woman shook her head repeatedly, hyperventilating. Words spilled from her mouth in a cascade, Cait’s ears struggling to catch it like hands struggling to catch water. “I don’t, no I don’t, please, please. Uh, uh, they, the p-people we sent a-a-after him, they didn’t come back, they went no-no-northwest.” As she said the last phrase, she nodded vigorously, as if affirming the statement to herself as well as to the Vault Dweller. “They w-w-w-w-”

 

Janice slapped her with a free hand, just hard enough to be felt. “Spit it out, come on, focus. A deep breath, and tell me.”

 

A sucking, pained sound came out of the woman’s throat as she took in a breath, and then let it out, saying all at once, “They were talking about a fort northwest where everyone died.” Another, quicker breath, and she continued. “Synths and turrets and a .44 revolver did it. They did us all in, I swear, I swear.”

 

“Don’t worry, I believe you,” Janice said. “And, luckily enough for you, I think I know which fort you’re talking about. Fort Hagen?”

 

The gunner woman couldn’t bear to look at Janice as she nodded. Cait noted that almost half of the woman’s shirt had been soaked in blood from where Janice ruined her right shoulder. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s what they said, that’s the fort, it is, I swear.” She drew the last word out into a sob, continuing in a sobbing fit, the r sound being repeated with each bounce of her head and voice. 

 

“I appreciate it,” Janice said, and asked, “Are you skinny enough I can count your ribs?”

 

The woman nodded, continuing in her hysterical sobbing. 

 

Janice nodded in return. “Alright, hold still, I’m going to lift up your shirt. Hold still.” Her voice had turned comforting, almost motherly. Cait shivered. While Cait watched, Janice lifted up the hem of the woman’s once white tee, lowering her head to look under it, count down to the fourth rib, and slide the knife between the fourth and fifth rib. Janice held her head against her shoulder, going, “Shhhhhhh, shhhhhhh.” She stopped sobbing after about thirty seconds. 

 

Janice stood up and turned to Cait, seeing her with her arms folded across her chest, leaning her back against the shack wall. 

 

“So it’s Fort Hagen, then?”


	11. Going Forward

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A lot of stuff happens in this chapter, and I am happy to say that, at the end, I finally got to write some fluffy stuff! Oh, it feels good to get out of the doom and gloom.

Bent backed, Mary planted the shovel into the already disturbed ground repeatedly. She felt this should be her responsibility. Preston Garvey had more important matters to attend to, as befit his station, but Mary fought alongside them, would have died if not for them. So it only made sense that she should dig Eddie’s and Lawrence’s graves. It was becoming too cold to sweat terribly much, even while conducting physical labor. Mary, though, tried as hard as she could to make herself, the repeated motions burning her back muscles with lactic acid, the shovel’s grip almost giving her blisters even through the gloves that she wore. She moved in jerky motions, the power of her muscles, though somewhat malnourished compared to Pre-War standards, still sending dirt flying into the air behind her. She’d gotten four feet down in the first one when she heard a man speaking behind her. Remembering the dying sounds that Lawrence and Eddie had made almost drowned out the voice. 

 

“Hey, Mary,” an elderly woman’s voice said. She recognized it as Mama Murphy’s slow, chill cadence, Murphy being the one old woman in the settlement. According to some, she could see things that she shouldn’t have been able to, while high as a kite on Jet or Mentants or Buffout. Mary looked over her shoulder to Mama Murphy and nodded, acknowledging the beanie and sweater wearing woman’s presence. “You doing okay out here? You look kinda agitated.”

 

Mary shifted slightly to make sure she wouldn’t be flinging dirt at the woman. “Yeah, you could say that.”

 

About twenty seconds of furious shoveling and no conversing passed. Murphy continued the conversation. “Well, you mind telling me what it’s about? I won’t poke fun or start gossip or anything like that.”

 

“Hm.” Another few seconds passed, and Mary planted the shovel in the ground and stood up straight, stretching with her hands on her lower back. “Are you aware of what happened to Lawrence and Eddie?”

 

“Who?”

 

“They were Minutemen, and we went on a job together, to wipe out a gang of raiders that killed Blake Abernathy’s daughter. Preston came, too. We killed all of the raiders that were at the Olivia Satellite station, but they got Lawrence and Eddie. The thing is, if I’d been more vigilant, if I’d moved faster or hadn’t gotten hurt…” Mary sighed and picked up the shovel. 

 

Mama Murphy stepped closer and leaned in, getting a good look at Mary’s bandages on her head and shoulder. “Oh, girl, your wounds have broken open again. Come back to Sanctuary, kid. Let me mix you up some Mama Murphy Special.”

 

Mary put a hand on her hip and let out a quick chuckle. “Mama Murphy, if the Vault Dweller hears that you’re turning people onto the junk she’ll have your guts for garters.”

 

Waving a dismissive hand, Mama Murphy said, “Oh, psh. She doesn’t even wear garters. Probably. And if you won’t let me give you some of my stuff, then at least let me get you some gumbo. Or, heck, even some water, or you’re going to kill yourself working this hard.”

 

Still insistent, Mary shook her head. “Sorry. I’ve got to finish this. I would appreciate you bringing some water out here, though. I’ll even slow down a bit for you, how’s that?”

 

The old woman shrugged and started, hesitantly, off. “Better than nothing, I suppose. Just, make sure you have a chat with the old frenchie down the hill when you’re done, too. Don’t want you getting any infections.”

 

Mary laughed again, this time with a little more intent. “Of course. I’ll probably be done in a couple hours, anyway.” As she got back to work, she watched Mama Murphy head back in her slightly hunched posture. In her mind, it was probably good to have a town grandmother in Sanctuary, even if she was a drug addict and maybe a bit delusional. She bent back over, her lower back protesting a little, and got back to work.

 

*****

 

When the door to the roof opened, Ian didn’t shoulder his laser musket. Sitting against the air vent beside him, he put a hand on Angie’s shoulder, keeping her from shooting at the man walking out. She’d tried to convince him to keep fighting, and then just sat down next to him when he didn’t respond. This man stepping forward, though, had a deep brown tint to his skin rather than a deep green. He also lacked severe physical deformities and a minimum six and a half foot height. When he saw them, the man lifted up his combat shotgun to his shoulder and shouted, “Put down your guns! We killed the Super Mutants, but we’re taking the Tower, got it?”

 

Ian slung his arm forward, holding a thumbs up in front of his own face. “You got it, mister. Mind telling me who you’re working for, though?”

 

“You’ll find out,” another man said, stepping forward, a bandage wrapped around his bald head and his heavy beard stained with blood. Angie tossed down her rifle out of her own arm’s reach after the first man walked out of the stairwell. “Both of you, get up.”

 

Somehow, Ian found the will to stand before Angie did. When he looked back at her, though, she looked shocked. He extended a hand. “Come on, Angie. He’s probably not going to do anything worse than mutilate and murder us.”

 

Angie scoffed a laugh, and took his hand as he helped her to rise. She leaned her head on his shoulder, and he felt himself start to come back to reality. They’d survived. Thanks to this guy across the rooftop from them. Neither of them had even lost any limbs, and they might have a future. “The both of you, strip,” the man with the beard said. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to do anything just yet. I just want to make sure you aren’t going to stab me with a knife you’ve got hidden up your ass right now.”

 

Ian shrugged and started to take off his boots. Angie stood tall, defiant. “You can fuck right off with that bullshit. Why the hell should we trust you?”

 

“Because I saved your asses and haven’t ordered Jonah Man here to blow your fucking heads off.” To Ian’s ears, the bearded man sounded a little pissed. “Now hurry the hell up. It’s not like I want to gawk at your skinny ass; I’m just trying to watch my own ass.”

 

Angie shook her head and put a hand on Ian’s back, stopping him as he got to work on his second shoe. “Hell, no. I know raiders, we say one thing and do the other, so fuck off. First it’s take off your clothes, then it’s bend over and quit squirming.”

 

Having finally regained himself, Ian felt his heart hammer at his ribcage. “Angie, we don’t have a bargaining chip. I don’t want to die. Just do what he says.”

 

“Aside from the fact that I’m not going to fucking touch you,” the bearded man told them, “you know that he’s right. Now, come on. Strip.”

 

Cringing, Ian finished taking off his left boot as Angie shot him a look that let him know, if anything happened, she’d find him in hell, she’d be his tormenter. He knew how creative she could be when she had someone at her mercy. He didn’t want that. He didn’t want her to get hurt, either, but that feeling was not as strong. 

 

Stripping in front of these men didn’t feel erotic in the slightest. He felt as though they were almost half as embarrassed as he felt, rose spots appearing on his cheeks. Strange, he thought as he stepped out of his pooled pants, that he could walk into a Super Mutant’s gore covered hideout and not feel anything more than a slight twinge in his gut, but stripping in front of these men turned his stomach. He told himself that it was because he had no other choice. He always had a choice before, but if he were to refuse now, they’d hurt Angie, and he couldn’t have that on his head.

 

Ian stood naked on the rooftop as the man with the combat shotgun started going through his clothes, pulling out the knife on his belt, the little .22 pistol he kept in his jacket. “Alright,” the bearded man said. “Turn around, squat, cough. And spread your cheeks before you cough.”

 

Ian scowled, but did as he asked. When he turned around, he saw Angie start to take off her shirt, and he averted his eyes. After the orifice checking procedure had finished, Ian stood back up, hand on his hip as he stared hard at the bearded man, doing his best to make him feel uncomfortable. “Can I get my boxers back?” He held his hand out, waiting. 

 

“Do it, Jonah Man,” the bearded man said, giving the guy looking through the clothes a little nudge with his shoe. The guy, currently turning Angie’s shirt inside out, slapped his foot.

 

“I got it, man. Piss off.”

 

After he once again donned his underwear, Ian kept his eyes off of Angie, no matter how much her skinny, nude form asked for them. He heard her little cough as he looked away, and the bearded man said, “Cough harder. Could be hiding anything up there.”

 

Ian took a step forward, saying, “Have a little respect, asshole.” As he lifted his hand to point at the man, though, the bearded man pulled out a pistol from its holster on his hip. 

 

“Try me. I’ve killed fifty three people. Take another step forward. Be the fifty fourth. Just try me.”

 

Angie was receiving her panties by then, though. Apparently, he’d distracted them enough, and Ian breathed a sigh of relief, lowering his hand. “Fine. I appreciate it, though. The whole not killing us thing. That’s nice.”

 

“Real fuckin’ nice,” Angie said, reaching around behind her to clasp on her long stretched out, ill fitting bra. “Can we get our shoes back, too, since you’re going to be marching us out of here to meet whoever it is you want us to meet.”

 

“Sure.”

 

As Ian started to strap on his makeshift shoes again, he continued scowling, but only because he had to do something with his face to keep him from smiling. Hours before, when the Super Mutants started to wipe out their people, she told him to keep an eye out while she slipped a closed stiletto switchblade into her ass. So she could end herself in case the Super Mutants captured them, she said. Ian agreed with the idea, but had nothing small enough to fit inside him that wouldn’t cut him to ribbons from the inside. 

 

*****

 

Cait recounted the amount of ammunition she had with her as she, Janice, and the four Minutemen, Gary included, trekked towards Fort Hagen. With the weapons she had, she felt secure in the knowledge that anyone that fucked with them would have more than a hundred bullets from her alone to contend with. When the cottonmouth from withdrawal hit, she felt secure in her multitude of chems in her bag, as well. Walking behind Janice, she felt a little guilty that she’d stolen Janice’s chems from the hospital shack, but at the same time, knew that they’d see better use out here than they ever would have back in Sanctuary. 

 

Fort Hagen resided in a small, uninhabited settlement to the west of Boston, and they regrouped in an empty Red Rocket Truck Stop on the north side of it. Cait and the Minutemen sat up on the bar stools to eat, though Janice sat on a plastic chair in the corner, reading an ancient newspaper and sipping from her canteen. Gary told his story about killing the Yao Guai. She figured that they were all tense as they shared their own, increasingly embarrassing stories, all of them but Cait. It was when one of them asked, “So, Cait, did your parents ever beat the living shit out of you, too?” when Janice stepped forward and said, “Alright, boys and girls. Playtime’s over. We’ve got some synths and a mercenary to kill.”

 

“Let’s fuckin’ get him, then,” Cait said, grabbing her rifle from the bar and looping the strap over her shoulder.

 

“Haha,” Gary said, clapping her on the back. “That’s the spirit!”

 

When he touched her, Cait spun around, slapping his hand away. “Get yer fuckin’ hands off me, boyo. I’m tense as all hell, and I won’t hold myself responsible if I end up breakin’ some fingers when you touch me.”

 

Gary just threw up his hands and glanced at Janice. 

 

When they approached Fort Hagen from the rear, trying to get in through the scaffolding, Gary led the way out into the open when a turret they hadn’t noticed opened fire on him. He stumbled backwards, blood spraying in a fine mist as he collapsed onto the slanted piece of wood he’d just walked up. His flannel shirt, which Cait had wanted for being so nice, had been ruined, torn to shreds over the course of a second from the automatic turret fire. He hadn’t even gotten a shot off. Cait grabbed his semi automatic pistol and a red inhaler from inside her bag before anyone else reacted to the man’s dying. 

 

She huffed the Jet inside just before stepping up to be on eye level with the turret, lifting Gary’s pistol. Over the course of a second, before it could detect her, she dumped the twelve bullets in the pistol into it, turning it into a smoking, ruined wreck. She dropped the pistol and pulled her foot back before the blood pooling under Gary could stain her shoe. 

 

When they all climbed up onto the roof, everyone trying to forget Gary already, Cait pointed at a hatch in the concrete roof. “Lookit, a trapdoor. You buggers ready to gun down some synths?”

 

A man with a close cropped beard, a hat from a museum, and a laser musket in his hands clutched his hand tight around his weapon’s stalk and said in a wet voice, “Let’s do it.”

 

Dropping down into the building took them into a stairwell. The interior of the building, some how, had been more ravaged by the nuclear apocalypse than the exterior. Cait supposed it was looters that tore up the interior, rather than one of the bombs. Her thoughts moved quickly while on the Jet, though not all of them made sense. This was one exception. Her rifle felt heavy, reliable in her hands. She wanted to bash one of the synths to death with it. 

 

A clacking noise caught her attention. She stepped forward into the hallway adjacent to the stairwell, and spotted something that looked like a steel skeleton, machinery on display, marching towards them, clawed feet piercing through the rubble and raising dust into the air. The “mouth” didn’t move as it spoke in a patently robotic way, shouting, “Intruder! Lay down your arms a-”

 

Cait cut it off with a rifle shot, the Jet letting her aim a headshot with ease before the synth could react. It collapsed, the shot ringing in her ears for a moment, but her being used to constant gunfire meant that it faded after but a couple seconds. One of them punched its way through the thin drywall that separated the hallway from the other rooms, this one with a milky white, faux skin that came in sections, an armored mask over its head. Cait put three bullets in its torso, but it charged her anyway, extending a baton in its hand, electric energy running up and down it. She dodged backwards out of the range of its first swing, knocking it off balance with the butt of her rifle to its mask, and then planting another four bullets into its upper torso. It collapsed, sparks and stuttered robotic speech barely audible beneath the damp feeling in Cait’s ears.

 

She heard gunshots behind her, and turned to see a Minuteman drop one of the synths, Janice gunning down a couple of them in another room. The other two Minutemen stood at the top of the staircase, sending bullets down. Cait thought she might have had more of an instinct for fighting, but damn if Janice didn’t know strategy. For a couple of minutes, their methodical, skilled approach worked quite well. Cait managed to avoid taking any injuries, and while Janice was grazed with a laser beam along her ribs, it was nothing that a Stimpak couldn’t fix over the course of a few seconds. She and Janice killed the last synth together, Cait circling around its cover to flank it and Janice taking it out after it had been driven out of cover behind its desk. 

 

“Cait,” Janice called over the ringing in both their ears, “we need to check on the stairwell couple. I haven’t heard any gunfire from that side in a while.”

 

Cait nodded and followed Janice out of the room back into the hall. As they walked down the hallway, the ringing fading from their ears, Cait heard some whimpering, and Janice must have as well because they both broke out into a run down the debris ridden hallway. They rounded the corner to find one of the Minutemen dead on the ground, her pistol several feet away down the stairwell, the both of them surrounded by shell casings, and the other sitting up against the wall, his rifle hanging limp in his hand. The woman looked to have been run through a microwave, much of her hair charred off, leaving blackened and bleeding skin all over her scalp, and Cait noted several more burns on her arms and torso. When she brought her eyes over to the whimpering man, Cait noticed a bundled, burning cloth in the corner, which, as she looked at him, she recognized to be his shirt. 

 

Blood coated his chin and upper chest, and Cait saw, on the forearm of the arm that held the rifle, a burn that went down to the bone, the skin charred and black, blood pouring so freely from the interior that she almost couldn’t see the bone. The same could be said for about half his torso, the stench of charred flesh accompanying the stenches of urea and feces. It became apparent to her that he’d pissed himself, probably from the pain, or from fear. On the landing below them, though, lay about eight synth wrecks, them all riddled with bullet holes. While she looked around, Janice was on her knees beside the injured man, her laser rifle from Paladin Danse beside the man, digging out a Stimpak. 

 

“You’ll be alright, don’t worry,” Janice said, slipping the Stimpak into his outer thigh and depressing the plunger. “I’ve seen Stimpaks heal worse injuries than this.” She started digging out another Stimpak

 

The man made a choked moaning sound that reminded Cait of a feral Ghoul, to the point that she had to restrain herself from opening fire on him. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the last Minuteman with them, knuckles white around the grip of his laser musket, a fresh burn scar on his right forearm, likely healed with a Stimpak. Instead of running to cry over his fallen friends, as Cait expected from a civilian militiaman, he stood in place, hard faced as he looked over the scene. As the man against the wall’s wounds began to heal, Janice stood and turned to the last standing Minuteman.

 

“I want you to take him back to Sanctuary when his wounds are stable,” Janice said to him in a low voice. “He’s not in fighting shape, but you are. If Sanctuary is too far, then take him to Oberland Station. The railway bridge ought to be clear, and you can follow the rails right to Oberland.” The Minuteman nodded, and Janice clapped a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “He’s going to live. As long as nothing does him in out there, then he’ll live.”

 

“You got it, general.”

 

After they traded words, Janice turned back to Cait and started into the hallway. “Come on. I saw an elevator. We can go lower that way. Kellogg won’t be able to hide from us for long.”

 

*****

 

After finishing the graves, Mary really wanted that gumbo. She found Mama Murphy in her armchair on the hill overlooking the lower part of Sanctuary, including the gate. Said gate had two guards on either side of it at all times, all four of them manning the turrets there. Mama Murphy had her eyes on the people working the farms, which grew wheat, carrots, tatos, and corn. The corn dominated the farms, as it was easier to farm, and you didn’t have to eat as much of it to get a lot of energy out of it. Right then, though, during the winter, they didn’t grow anything except for the tato.

 

“Mama Murphy,” Mary said, walking down towards her.

 

She turned her head in that relaxed, turtle slow way she had. “Hey, kid. You want to hear a story, kid?”

 

Mary stopped a couple yards away, hands on her hips but a playful expression on her face. “I want some of that gumbo. Think you could tell me the story afterwards?”

 

Mama Murphy shook her head. “No, kid. No, you gotta hear it now, it’s important.” Sighing, Mary conceded. “Good, kid, good. Now, then. Once upon a time, there was this girl. The most popular girl in Diamond City. Strong, fast, pretty, and everybody liked her, and I mean everybody. Even some people that shouldn’t have. One day, the mayor, he took her up to his office, and hurt her, and he hurt her real bad.” 

 

Mary felt a flush of embarrassment and apprehension hit her. “What are you getting at, Mama Murphy?”

 

She continued as if she hadn’t heard Mary. “Well, this mayor, nobody liked him anyway. So they ran him outta town, but the girl, she was always different from then on, always a bit off. Even when she grew up, even when she got old. Nothing scared her like it should’ve. Sometimes she Saw things, with a capital S. Anyway, her life took her all over the Commonwealth. Some people called her crazy, others a quack, or a junkie, but this girl ended up, you guessed it, in some old suburb. And she thought life, life was pretty sweet. She could die here, but then, this girl, she felt something. She Saw something. Something red and angry, something coming.”

 

Fear, straight on fear of the unknown, hit Maria right in the chest. “What was it, Mama Murphy? What’s coming?”

 

The old woman squeezed her eyes shut. “A massive ship. Full of angry men and women, with armor. And a woman, redhead, with an iron mask and marks on her face. And something even worse, something from the west, but not on the ship.” Her eyes snapped open, and she wore fear on her face and recognition like makeup. “Oh, kid, we gotta tell that girl that runs the place.”

 

Maria gulped hard. “Maybe we should. 

 

“There’s no maybes with this, kid. We should.” She looked down and away, like she was thinking of a list of items she needed. “We should.”

 

*****

 

Down in the dark, Cait kept her rifle shouldered the whole way. They’d pass beneath flickering, buzzing lights on occasion, but for the most part, all the way below the earth, the only lights came from her muzzle flash, Janice’s lasers, and the glowing orange eyes of the synths. The light reflected around on the concrete walls made her able to find their silhouettes and thus end their consciousnesses. The Jet still running through her system, repeatedly preserving her own existence and Janice’s, Cait never felt any more in her element than she did then. 

 

Still, the synths knew to kill, and Cait was not infallible. She rounded a corner into a hallway, and gunned down a synth as it charged her with a shock baton in hand, but in her back, she felt a sickening burn sprout, the blue light from the synths’ lasers lighting up the hallway. She felt her vest catch fire, and she let loose a scream as she ripped it off and fell forward, dropping her rifle. On the ground, she saw the synth stride forward, leveling the laser pistol in its hand to her forehead, just before Janice riddled it with her own laser life, the red beams from her rifle knocking it into the wall as it instinctively cringed away from the damage. Janice didn’t pause to check the synth, though, instead kneeling beside Cait and muttering, “Oh, Jesus, please don’t be dead, don’t be dead.”

 

Cait groaned and complained, “I’m not dead, you old bag. I’m just fucking shot.”

 

“Thank God,” Janice said, and Cait gasped again as her friend jabbed a syringe into her shoulder and depressed the plunger. Air hissed through Cait’s teeth as the pain in her shoulder blade began to fade. “Fucking lasers. End up spending so much money on Stimpaks to heal burns.” Cait felt her inject her with another Stimpak, though she relaxed this time and she did not find any discomfort with it. She looked over and saw her vest burning on the concrete floor a few feet to Janice’s left. A pang of regret hit her. She’d worn that vest since before Tommy, ah, acquired her. She pushed it out of her mind as her wound on her shoulder blade knit. As she brought herself to her feet, Cait thanked Janice and grabbed her rifle from off the ground. While they continued, she appreciated the fact that she’d worn a tank top beneath the vest. 

 

“Let’s go get this bastard already,” Cait said, and silently lamented the loss of her bag with her vest. Janice nodded, and they continued pushing through the underground facility. They moved with an excruciating carefulness, Janice insisting on methodically cleaning up the entire place to make sure neither of them got shot in the back again. As they pressed on, more and more of the lights were on and functional, and as they crept down a hallway, Cait jumped, a man’s voice sounding through one of the loudspeakers set high into the wall. 

 

“And there she is. The most resilient woman in the Commonwealth.” While moving forward, Cait tried to focus on not being burned to death, but still caught some of the words. Something about how he didn’t expect her to get far, how she shouldn’t even have made it to Diamond City in the first place. Glancing over her shoulder, though, she saw Janice’s teeth grinding as she absorbed every last word. 

 

“That’s him, alright,” Janice growled after the loudspeakers stopped making noising. “The motherfucker that killed my husband.”

 

After the initial pang of jealousy, Cait felt another one of guilt. “We’ll get him. Don’t worry.”

 

“I’m not worried, Cait. He should be worried.” Then a synth rounded the corner ahead in the hall of them, and Cait’s ears started ringing from the bullets she put in its torso. After they came around it, they a heavy, metal door met them. Janice tried it, but it didn’t budge. Then the loudspeakers started up again.

 

“You’ve come this far. Something tells me that a locked door won’t stop you.”

 

The door swung inwards, revealing an odd mixture between a bedroom and a storeroom. Crate with rounded edges, in vibrants reds, blues, and whites, lined the walls, with a bed smack dab in the middle of it, and another heavy, solid steel door on the other side. As they started their way across it, Janice grabbed a couple of Stimpaks from a first aid case and Cait wondered just what the hell this room was for. Before getting to the door, though, Janice turned to Cait, stopping.

 

“Cait, I have a feeling that Kellogg is right on the other side of this door. He’s survived a long time, so he’s going to have a few tricks up his sleeve, but I want you to stay by the door, in solid cover. Don’t argue, please. If I go down the instant I walk through that door, you need to stay back here and finish the fight for me.” At Cait’s scowl, she said, “I swear to God, Cait, you had better do this for me.”

 

“Just let me go first.”

 

“No. No, Cait, I want to make something abundantly clear to you, and that is that I will never want you to walk into a dangerous situation before me. At Drumlin Diner, you saved my life, but I felt terrible for putting you in that situation in the first place. And I am so sorry you got hurt, Cait.” Without warning, Janice wrapped her arms around Cait, her laser rifle on its strap making the embrace a little awkward. Still leaning her chin on her friend’s shoulder, Janice told her, “I don’t want to die, Cait. But if I do, I need you to promise me something.”

 

Janice pulled back, and for once, Cait didn’t feel like cracking a joke or something to break the painful reverence of the moment. “Anything.”

 

“Take care of Sanctuary. Of my legacy, everything I’ve done in the Commonwealth. If I die and no one is there to hold it together, then Sanctuary will fall apart.”

 

Cait nodded, wiped the stringy, red hair from her face and took a step up by the metal door with the little grate. “Go get him, Janice. I’ll cover you from here.”

 

As her friend strode through the door, Cait realized that she only had the one magazine left on her belt, since the rest had been unsalvageable in the wreck of her flaming bag. The Irish lush peeked her head around the corner, watching the lights flash on as Janice walked, cautious, forward. A couple of synths stepped out from around a set of desks and computers, flanking a bald man with a nasty scar over his left eye, a .44 revolver in his hand, though pointing at the floor, and a leather jacket on. Odd. Cait had imagined he’d be wearing as much armor as humanly possible for this confrontation. 

 

“Funny how we ended up like this, huh?” Kellogg said in a mirthless voice as Janice stopped by the opposite end of the row of desks, legs tense, ready to throw her into cover at a moment’s notice. 

 

“Where’s my son, you bastard?” she growled.

 

Kellogg shrugged. “He’s not hurt, don’t worry. A little older than you might be expecting, but you probably figured that out by now. 

 

“Fuck you, Kellogg. Tell me where he is!” Janice’s voice broke as it became progressively more shrill. 

 

“Heh. Like I said, don’t worry. He’s right at home. In the Institute.” Cait could almost feel how greasy this guy was from twenty feet away. 

 

“Goddamn it, where? Where is it?!”

 

“Haven’t you been paying attention?” To Cait’s ears, he sounded like a father scolding his daughter for idiocy. “You don’t find the Institute. The Institute finds you. You open the closet, nothing’s there but a closet. You don’t see the monster until it jumps out at you.” His hand wrapped around a little felt covered box on the desk next to him, and Cait leaned out further, ready to shoulder and fire when, inevitably, the shooting started. “But enough talking. That’s not what we’re here for. Let’s get started, huh? You ready?”

 

Cait could almost hear Janice’s teeth grinding at his condescending tone. “In a hundred years, when I die, I only hope that I go to hell so that I can kill you all over again, you son of a bitch.” Then Kellogg hit the button on his Stealth Boy and disappeared from view. Janice took a shot at one of the synths as she took cover behind the desk, knocking off a plate of its “flesh.”

 

Cait knocked it the rest of the way over, and took cover as a burst of automatic laser fire came from the other one. To her credit, though, Janice kept her head and shredded the synth shooting at Cait. Then a frag grenade landed behind the desk with Janice, and she shouted, “Cait get down,” while throwing herself to the other side of the desk. Heeding her advice, Cait ducked behind the doorjamb and plugged her ears, letting the strap around her shoulder catch her rifle. Still, the explosion in the next room seemed to hit her even through the concrete wall, the shock wave making her jolt in place. With no time to lose, she turned back around the corner, shouldering her rifle at the same time. On the opposite end of the room, she caught a shimmer of light, and took a shot at it. Over the low ringing in her ears, she saw Kellogg suddenly appear, stumbling behind a massive computer. As she brought her eyes back over to Janice, Cait saw a little spatter of blood on the wall behind where Kellogg had been. Her friend knelt beside a pillar holding up the ceiling, looking around the room, her clothes looking a little worse for wear, but the Vault Dweller herself not acting like it. 

 

A bullet tore apart the concrete of the wall just beside Cait’s head, sending shrapnel past her. As she took cover again, she felt warm blood on her face, followed by a searing pain across her cheekbone and the tip of her nose. With the blood dripping from her nose, it felt like it was running. Without thinking, she slammed the butt of her rifle against the wall beside her in frustration. She peeked back out, seeing Janice lighting up the computer Kellogg had taken cover behind, leaving scorch marks and shattering the screens. He stuck his hand out, firing a couple of times at Janice. As her friend took cover, Cait used the focus that the Jet had given her to shoot said hand. Firing several times in such an enclosed space set her ears to ringing, almost to the point of being disorienting. 

 

Blood spilled from Kellogg’s hand as his revolver fell from it. Cait expected him to dive after it like a raider would, so kept her aim on the spot he’d dive towards, but instead, a grenade started arcing through the air towards her. Her eyes widened. She felt her pulse quicken, but at the same time, everything else seemed to slow down as she brought her rifle around, and shot the grenade out of the air. Another explosion went off, and she lowered her rifle to aim at where Kellogg was just scrambling back behind cover. She didn’t manage to get him, though.

 

Janice had been pushing up towards Kellogg’s position, though, and over the deafening ringing in her ears, Cait heard the man’s screams as Janice set to burning him to death with red laser beams. The Irish redhead listened to the screams for a half a minute before they turned to a low groan. When she stepped forward, into the room, the smells of urine, burned flesh, and feces all mixed to give her that familiar scent of death. It was almost comforting, and Cait needed comfort when she saw her friend bawling beside the horrifically burned corpse, ribs and radii and pieces of skull exposed, one of his ears gone, one finger only attacked by a few sinews. Cait pulled her rifle off over her head and leaned it against the big computer before wrapping Janice up in a hug and pulling her head down onto her shoulder. The strap of her tank top soaked through in an instant, Cait scritching at the back of Janice’s sweaty, black haired head in an effort to comfort. The cold of the other woman’s rifle shocked Cait as it rubbed up against her hip under the hem of her tank. 

 

Half a minute passed as Cait stood and held Janice while she cried. The sobs went from horrible, hacking, body wracking things to sniffles between every few seconds over the course of the thirty seconds, and at the end, Janice pulled back, face splotchy, eyes wet, and wiped off the tears on Cait’s shoulder and the blood on her face with her sleeve. Somehow, despite the cooling corpse of the mutilated man on her right, Cait found the gesture adorable, and let out a little laugh, picking up her rifle. 

 

Another few seconds of silence passed before Cait said, “So, you wanna strip his skull for a keepsake, or ya wanna move on?”

 

Janice turned her head to the corpse of Kellogg and sighed. With a grunt, she bent over and picked up the .44 revolver from where Kellogg had dropped it in his writhing. During her looting of the corpse, Janice found a few extra .44 bullets and a little scrap of paper with a nonsensical combination of letters and numbers on it. “He said Shaun’s in the Institute,” Janice said, stepping over to the other side of the huge computer to access the terminal. It turned out that the nonsensical combination of letters and numbers was the password to the terminal. Cait stood behind Janice as she read whatever was on the screen. The redhead wasn’t much for reading, though she counted that among her skills. “His entries confirm it.”

 

“Do they say where the Institute is?”

 

“Rumor has it CIT was the place where the Institute started, but plenty of people have looted CIT, and no one’s found the Institute. Computer doesn’t give me any more information, except that if I asked a genie to teleport me to where Shaun is, I could expect to end up inside of the Institute.”

 

“What?”

 

“Forget it.” The corner of Janice’s slim mouth tugged up, like it always did when she said some Old World thing that Cait didn’t understand. For a little while it’d been irritating. Now she found it endearing, just like the majority of the things about this girl.

 

“If ya say so, boss. Now, come on. Let’s get out of here. I think I can see an elevator from here. How fuckin’ convenient is that?”

 

“Pretty damn.” Janice got up, but instead of heading towards the elevator that Cait had been looking at, she crossed the room to take the fusion cells from the synths’ laser weapons. Cait wondered why the Institute’s laser weapons were blue, when everyone else’s that she saw were red. Was blue hotter, or was it just aesthetic? After she finished looting, they followed each other over to the elevator, Cait wanting to find something to fill the silence, but coming up empty. Luckily enough, she didn’t have to, the mechanism of the elevator working with Janie to fill the space between them. “So, Cait. I need to find the entrance to the Institute, and I need to go to Diamond City, since that’s the only place I’m thinking of…” A moment of silence passed as Janice thought. “Actually, there was something in there about a renegade Institute scientist. Kellogg had tracked him to the Glowing Sea-”

 

“Oh, no,” Cait said in an authoritative tone. “I know ya wanna find your kid and all, but you shouldn’t set foot in the Glowing Sea. It’s a fuckin’ death sentence.”

 

Sighing, Janice told her, “I know, Cait. I wasn’t going to go there. Besides, I’ve worked with Nick Valentine on a lot of this stuff, and he’ll want to know what I’ve found out. Besides him, the only person that’s coming to mind that has any clue about where the Institute could be is Piper, the woman that runs Publick Occurrences these days.”

 

“Well, there’s the Railroad, too, ya know. I heard some of the raiders talkin’ about how they got some of their agents, and how the Railroad sneaks synths out of the Institute. They must have a pretty fuckin’ good idea of how to find the Institute.”

 

Janice sounded a little defeated. “I know what the Railroad is, Cait. Not even the damned Institute can find them, how am I supposed to?”

 

“I don’t know! It’s just a suggestion.” Cait leaned against the side of the elevator and wondered why it was taking so long, just as it stopped and the door opened with a happy little *ding!* As they both stepped out, Cait squinted at the sun, her head suddenly pounding. “Hang on a minute, I gotta go piss.”

 

Just as Cait brushed past Janice, though, the Vault Dweller grabbed her shoulder, stopping her. “Cait, I know you usually have to go shoot up when you say that.”

 

Cait shook her head. “I really gotta go empty myself this time. And besides, all my chems died in the fire.” She continued past Janice to go around the corner. When she came back, flipping on her safety, Janice spoke to her from where she leaned against the brick wall, arms folded.

 

“Cait, we have to talk. I said that I’d talk to you about this after we killed Kellogg, so let’s talk.” She stood up straight again. Suddenly, Cait felt her heart pound against her chest. “I’ve seen you making eyes at me, don’t think I haven’t. When I was naked, you couldn’t keep your eyes off my chest. And I don’t know how to feel about that.”

 

“Well, I was only starin’ because yer puffy nipples are so damned funny looking.” 

 

Laughter bubbled between Janice’s words as she gave Cait a playful shove and said, “Shut up! I’m trying to be serious here!” Even as she said this, Cait’s face wore a broader smirk than Janice had seen on her. “Look, I know you like me. And when you were looking at me like that, sure I got a little red in the face, but I can’t say that I want you to stop looking at me like that. I just have no fucking clue what to do with that, though.”

 

Cait’s smirk turned suave as she strode up to Janice, close, eyes half lidded as she down towards Janice’s collarbone, made exposed during the exertion a few minutes ago. “What, like this?” This time, the Vault Dweller’s face started turning into a tomato. “Just take it wherever you want it to go, Vault Dweller.” All at once, Janice stepped back, covering her face. Cait held her arms out to her side. “What did I do, huh, what am I supposed to do, just quit giving a shit about you? Well, tough shit, ‘cause I just can’t do that.” Janice had turned away, but her body wasn’t moving like she was sobbing, so Cait continued. “I killed for you, Janice. Granted, I’ve killed a man over a huff of Jet, but I ate some cunt out and smashed her head in ten seconds later, for you. I wouldn’t have done that for anyone else, not even myself, not anymore.”

 

As Janice turned around, Cait lowered her arms, but that indignant look stayed on her face. A weird look crossed Janice’s face. “You know, I love that tank top on you. Just barely modest enough to be teasing. And you didn’t do anything wrong, it’s just…” She let the rest of the sentence fall into a sigh. 

 

“Just what? Janice, if you kissed me right now, I think my heart’s beating fast enough and withdrawal is about to start soon enough that I’d faint.”

 

“Cait, when you talk like that, I see my husband’s face.” The sentence hit Cait hard enough she stumbled a couple of steps backwards. Janice had her arms folded, looking down and away, ashamed or embarrassed or something. “You’re not him. You’re this crazy junkie who’s better at killing that I am, and you’re beautiful, not because of it, but despite it. And I really do love that tank top because of your little curves, and I don’t know what to do because when you talk like that I just see Nate, and it’s like I might be able to have someone again.”

 

“That’s what I’m here for. To have your back. To be haved. Or something.” A scoffing laugh popped, choked, out of her mouth. “Janice, I know you and I live dangerously, and I know that, any day, you could die, but dammit, I’m only really here for you. I’m a snappy bitch to everyone else, but in the couple of weeks that we’ve known each other, I know you better than I knew my own parents. Our lifestyle could tear us apart quicker’n anything, but it brings ya together, too.” Cait blinked rapidly as Janice looked back up with her almost black eyes.

 

A tiny quirk of Janice’s mouth took a load off of Cait. “That might be the smartest thing that I’ve ever heard you say, Cait.”

 

“I know, right? Who wouldn’ want to have me?” She grinned broad with the sarcastic statement, and Janice noticed a couple of her lower teeth missing and, in passing, wondered what it’d be like to run her tongue over the gum there. For some reason, the idea didn’t seem too repulsive. “Now, we could stand here and chat all day, but it’s gonna be dark soon. We ought to get started with the shelter.”

 

Janice nodded, and they set to building a little shelter to sleep in up against the wall of Fort Hagen from various bits of rubble and debris. Afterwards, they climbed in together, laying down on a folded up American flag. A stick held up the end of the tent that their feet met at, and a stone held down the other end taut enough for them to lay down. Cait climbed in second, and took the same position as Janice, laid on her back with her hands folded over her sternum. Cait’s mouth felt dry, both from the slight withdrawal and from having fought for the better part of an hour without drinking anything. 

 

After a couple of minute of exchanging smiles, Janice pulled out her canteen, and they both drank deep from it. Another thing to get a new one of, Cait thought. Then, after Janice put the canteen away, she laid her hand on Cait’s, where hers had taken up the space between them. She laced her fingers through Cait’s, before Cait turned her hand over so that they could hold hands more comfortably. Looking over at Janice, Cait said, “You know, I gotta say, you’re the only girl I’ve ever done more for that get a drink. An’ there’s a reason for that.”

 

The right corner of Janice’s mouth tightened upward. “I know. And I’m so sorry, Cait, for getting you hurt.”

 

Cait shook her head. “It’s not like I’ve not gotten shot before. And I made the choice to do it for you.” With her free hand, she pointed at a little, puckered scar on her left shoulder, her left hand beneath Janice’s right. “See, there, that’s from when-”

 

“I don’t mean that, Cait. I’m apologizing for what you did to save me.”

 

“It was worth it. To save you, it was worth it.”

 

“It was my fault. I took us to Walden Pond, even though I knew that it’d be inhabited-”

 

“It’s not your fault, Janice. It’s no one’s but the bastards that tried to do you in, who are dead now. It’s not your fault.” Cait gave her a reassuring squeeze of her hand. “Thanks.”

 

“For what?”

 

“Being here. With me, here.” A few seconds of silence passed. “You know, there’s never been someone that I’ve wanted to do things properly with. Usually it’s just they ask for a shag and I either give ‘em a well placed kick or I find some semi-quiet spot and we shag, but-”

 

Cait had been staring, nervous, at the bag above them, so she only registered movement out of the corner of her eye an instant before Janice’s lips found hers. The other woman’s hand lit on her hip, and Cait couldn’t help but feel like she should’ve wiped some grease on her lips or something, since hers were chapped and Janice’s felt like fucking velvet. After Janice pulled back, Cait laid there, silent, staring up into Janice’s eyes, black in the dim light. “How’s that?” Janice asked. By way of a response, Cait wrapped a hand around the woman’s head and mashed her lips to Janice’s again, letting out a short, quiet moan into her mouth. When she deepened the kiss, she felt Janice ever so carefully slide her leg over, straddling Cait. 

 

Neither of them wasted much time, very obviously desperate for the other’s touch. Cait started moaning a little more into Janice’s mouth as their tongues slipped over each other and the Vault Dweller kneaded her left breast, particularly the erect nipple beneath her tank top. The redhead’s own hands slipped down to momentarily grip Janice’s firm buttocks, before sliding up under her flannel shirt. Janice broke the kiss with a little squeal. “Your hands are so cold, Cait!”

 

Suddenly, Cait had her left hand cupping Janice’s warm crotch. The Vault Dweller’s eyes opened wider, but she didn’t object. “This oughta warm me up. Unless you just wanna slobber all over my face?”

 

The mischievous smile on Janice’s face made Cait feel warm enough down below that all she’d need to do to warm up her hands was masturbate. “Neither of those options sound bad. But, I think I want to move a little slowly. If you savor the chase, then when you catch up, it’s all the better.” Janice kissed her again, more tender this time. She pulled back after a few seconds with a wet smack.

 

“So, Janice. What the hell are we, then?” 

 

The Vault Dweller made herself comfortable, shifting her weight a little. “Well, right now, I don’t know. Dating? And if, when, I finally see you in the nude,” Janice said, drawing out the last one into a mocking “ooo” tone, “and I get my hands on you, properly, then we can call ourselves lovers. Slow though, okay? Can you do that?”

 

As Cait sighed, she let her lips buzz. “Oh, I dunno. Suppose I might, but you’ll have to lead by example. Can’t be groping me, got to be a gentlewoman.”

 

Leaning in a little, Janice said, “Oh, what a shame.” Then her lips found Cait again, and Cait finally found a word for that little warm, satisfied feeling in her belly, not the arousal just above her pubis. She hadn’t eaten all day, so it could only be one thing: happiness.


	12. How Long?

Red Tourette touched the hot iron to the man strapped into the iron chair, and he broke out into shrieking sobs. The woman with the swirling facial tattoos sighed and lowered the iron. As she did so, he kept sobbing, his eyeless head lolling against his shoulder. Red sighed. “Come on, man. I can only get so much out of the burns, the least you could do is keep screaming.”

 

“Please…” His sobs cut off the rest of the words, and Red figured that, maybe, she shouldn’t have broken his ribs. He couldn’t say more than a word at a time, usually. “Kill me…” 

 

Once again, she sighed. “Have it your way, then,” she said, the last word coming out strained as she smashed the iron into his face. To his credit, though, as she bashed his face in, he screamed. After his screams died and she kept on turning his face to pulp, she heard a knock on the solid steel door. She stuffed the poker back into the brazier and started for the door, putting her deformed mask back on from where it’d been sitting atop her head. As she yanked the door open, it creaked, revealing a slight young man standing before her, a pistol holstered and fear on his face.

 

“Miss Tourette, I’m sorry to interrupt, but Zeus is back, and-”

 

The man himself, deep black beard and head bandage, bodily lifted and dropped the man a couple of feet to his left, saying, “I can speak with Tourette myself, Ernum.” He turned his gaze to Red Tourette with a slightly fearful look, but not as fearful as when he told her he let the Blue Bitch get away. “Morning, Tourette. I took care of Tower Tom’s gang; my boys are dragging him down here as we speak.”

 

“Well, how fucking convenient is that?” She thumbed over her shoulder, said thumb somewhat stained with blood. “Ron just crapped out. I needed a new one, as it is. You did good, Zeus, good enough, I think, that I won’t have to brain you for being incompetent on your last job. And let’s make it easy on your people; take me to Tom.” 

 

Zeus nodded and started walking down the hallway, glancing over his shoulder to make sure that his boss was following him. As they walked, Red Tourette took a switchblade from inside her pocket, folded, and started lazily twirling it between her fingers. “And we got a couple of new recruits, too,” Zeus told her. “The guy, Ian, seems a little fucked in the head after surviving the Super Mutant attack, but they’re tough, and they must be a little smart to survive a mutie attack. Probably ought to introduce them to you, though. Girl’s name is Angela, or Angie.”

 

Tourette nodded. “We’ll show them what happens to people that wrong me. Make sure they come with me when I take Tom down to the room to play. Any other news?”

 

The man with the beard nodded as they rounded a corner. “Yeah. Some dumbass Minutemen went to Greygarden, told the robots that have been giving us our produce that they would take care of us or some shit. Anyway, some of our people dug that out of the robots with a few threats and gunshots, didn’t damage any of them more than, uh, what’s the word, superficially, so they waited until the Minutemen came back, and decapitated them and whatnot as an example.”

 

“Good,” Tourette said. “There’s a Super Mutant camp near Greygarden that I’d really like taken care of. Any day, they could realize that there’s a shitton of food right under their noses and take the place, so we need them gone.” They arrived at the front door of the stockpile, where Tower Tom, the massive man, was flailing and fighting the raiders that had their hands on him. As her people clamped down on his massive arms, Red Tourette flicked open the switchblade and planted all four inches of the steel stiletto into his belly. The already bruised, muscular man cried out and dropped to his knees as Tourette told her people, “Take him down to the play room. Let him get a good look at Ron before you move the body and strap him in, too. Make sure you take that knife out of him, too.”

 

Then she and Zeus stepped out front, finding Ian and Angie standing outside, several of Tourette’s raiders on either side, keeping a shrewd eye on them. Zeus was right. Ian’s eyes were trailing every which way, focusing on nothing in particular, like a prisoner looking around the first time for ways to escape. The woman, though, the skinny chick with the tangled mess of brown hair and those hard eyes, stared her down. For a moment, Tourette considered strangling her to death then and there, both as an example and to get rid of a woman that may rival her. Then she remembered that she’d be using Tom as an example, and grinned, though they couldn’t see it beneath her half melted mask. 

 

“Ian, Angie,” Tourette said, “come with me. I have something that I need to show you.”

 

*****

 

Watching Red Tourette torture Tower Tom, Ian didn’t know how he felt. Sure, Tom raped and murdered Ian’s mother in front of him when he was a kid, but now it was almost two decades later, and Tom had taught him just about everything he knew about fighting, raiding, about guns and chems and how to distill clean water and good alcohol. Tom had put on the tough guy act for a couple of minutes as Red beat his face good and bruised, swelling, but then they got onto the topic of Red’s sister.

 

“Lily Tourette,” Red said, holding a red hot combat knife under his chin. “What did you do to her? Where is she?” What Ian found unnerving about her question was that she was so still and calm about it. Whenever someone tried to talk to Ian about his family, he usually got screamy, so as to avoid getting teary.

 

“You mean you don’t know?” Tom said, with a momentary chuckle that earned him a red burn mark on the underside of his chin and a teeth grinding grunt. “She ran, so I shot her and stuffed her in a beer vat. Guess she must’ve gotten tired of screaming when I stuffed my cock in her.” A gob of red spit landed on Tourette’s mask after he said this, and a bloody grin split his face.

 

As Tourette held the knife over the brazier to get it warmed up again, she snapped in Angie’s direction and said, “Take the fucker’s pants off. Come on, step to it!”

 

Angie shot Ian a concerned look that she mirrored before stepping forward towards the bloody chair. When she stooped to undo his pants, she said, “Jesus, Tom, pissing yourself now? Really? You didn’t guess what she was going to do to you when she found out about Lily?”

 

The Tower glared down at her, what would have had most people quaking in their boots were he not currently strapped into a chair that tens of people had pissed themselves and died in. While striding over, Tourette held the knife in a heavily gloved hand and said, “Alright, Angie. Now get his boxers off.”

 

Though Ian had no doubt that she wasn’t terribly eager to see this man’s genitals, Angie did as Red Tourette commanded. Then she immediately stepped back over to the one clean part of the wall that she and Ian had been leaning against. They shared that look again as Tourette knelt in front of Tom, and Ian clutched Angie’s had so hard she thought she might need a Stimpak once the screaming started. Ian had heard the phrase “bloodcurdling scream” before then, but he didn’t really understand it until the first time he watched Angie torture someone. As good as she was, the way that Red sawed slow enough for Tom to feel each of the sinews in his cock burn and snap convinced Ian that she may be better at tearing screams from someone than even Angie. And Tom’s screams curdled his blood.

 

*****

 

While watching Sturges work, Mary patted at the bandages on her head and winced, followed by a muttered curse. Curie, Sanctuary’s resident medic, had told her it should take her a week to be back into operating condition. It’d been six days, but her scabs hadn’t gotten any better in four. As she ran her hand over her stubbly head, though, she felt thankful that her hair was growing back. They’d had to shave it to dig out the shotgun pellets that had lodge in her flesh. She turned her attention back to Sturges where he was making bullets from the pellets, admiring the way his sweaty, bared arm muscles glistened in the summer sun. His pompadour had come a little loose. He always kept it stiff with some product or other, mousse, Mary thought, but she preferred his hair when he let it fall loose, soft. 

 

As she looked around from her lounge chair on the hill, she saw people tending the little farms they’d made in the backyards of the decrepit houses, the massive Super Mutant named Strong chasing after a cat in the street to do unspeakable things to, five or so people walking the walls. Mary would be working, too, she wanted to, but Curie had demanded she take a week’s time off to allow her wounds to heal. “After all, it would not do to have ze stitches I so carefully stitched come out,” she’d said in her adorable little French accent. 

 

She couldn’t even talk to Preston Garvey about Minutemen matters, as he was out travelling to Fort Independence to organize a retaliation party against the Forged raider group. They’d become more aggressive of late, and burned a couple of farms near them. If she were healthy, then she’d be doing everything she could to help. But instead, here she was, lounging, being nothing but a liability, a nice, still target out in the open for a sniper to practice on. 

 

Mary couldn’t figure out how a seven and a half foot tall mass of muscle and deformities snuck up on her, but there Strong was, holding a snarling and scratching cat by its tail, ignoring the shallow scratches all over his forearm and chest. “Mary,” his booming, deep voice sounded from behind her, and she jumped, turning around. “Strong caught cat. You want some?”

 

Huh. Sharing, from a Super Mutant. Janice really did have a positive impact on this guy, and Janice’s impacts usually just left people dying. “I’d say yes, but let’s go make sure it doesn’t belong to anyone in town first, okay?”

 

Strong’s lack of facial expressions made it hard to read him, but from what few facial cues she could find and his tone, she thought him confused. “Strong caught cat. Cat is Strong’s unless someone takes it.”

 

Mary sighed and considered letting Strong butcher and cook the thing. Despite his brutish nature, he could usually figure out what were the good cuts of meat and how long to cook things. “Strong, I’m sorry, but I don’t think that I could forgive myself if some kid comes to me tomorrow asking if I’ve seen his tabby cat, and said cat is sitting in my belly. Let’s just go check, ok?”

 

“Fine.”

 

As they started down the hill, the cat still trying to claw off Strong’s leathern skin, Mary wondered why she didn’t live in some other settlement where she didn’t have to worry about Super Mutants peeling her skin off while she slept because they thought it looked pretty and some crazy fucking Vault Dweller let them in. 

 

When they started asking around, she glanced over at the eight foot wall of solid scrap with patrolling guards and automated turrets, and she remembered why she stayed here. Because here, at least, the only Super Mutants in the settlement were invited in. Ultimately, after a half an hour of wandering around the militarized suburb called Sanctuary, they found no cat owners, but Mary turned down Strong’s offer of cat stew, anyway. A skeleton had been sandwiched beneath a crumbled house they had yet to clean, and her appetite had gone. And besides that, there was the airship hanging over the southern horizon.

 

*****

 

Cait woke up with a start to a loudspeaker going off overhead, loud enough for them to have heard it if they were still underground in Kellogg’s hideout. For a moment, she grinned that Janice’s hand had landed on her breast while they slept, and then Janice woke up, too, and they scrambled out of the trash bag tent, Cait with her rifle in her hand. Looking up, they found a huge zeppelin flanked by several different vertibirds, obviously the source of the message, “WE ARE THE BROTHERHOOD OF STEEL! DO NOT BE ALARMED.” 

 

“We come in peace, yadda yadda,” Cait muttered as the message continued, looking over at Janice, who had her eyebrows knit tight together. The airship passed overhead, the message repeating and growing quieter with it, and Cait asked Janice, “We ran into some o’ them Brotherhood folks, earlier, didn’t we? One of them gave you that rifle you cooked Kellogg with, right?”

 

Janice nodded. “That’s right. Paladin Danse. I remember you and him were having some issues so he asked you to wait outside.”

 

A look of recognition crossed Cait’s face. “Right, Dancer, I remember him. Hey, you wonder why they call themselves knight and paladin an’ shit instead of sergeant and officer?” Cait didn’t know if the ranks were equivalent; they were just the first that came to mind. 

 

“Pride. Pride in your organization is a big thing in the military. Paladin Danse has got it in spades. Let’s get to Diamond City, talk to Piper and Nick.”

 

Cait sighed. “Just for one day, I’d like to go without trekking someplace, ya know?”

 

“You signed up for this. Think you’re fit enough to jog there?”

 

“Gimme some water, first.” After drinking deep of Janice’s canteen, Cait handed it back and started jogging alongside her friend. Janice had rolled up her sleeves for the heat, and left her shirt a little unbuttoned, and Cait drank in the sweat sliding down to her friend’s breasts like she was dying of thirst. After about twenty minutes, they slowed to a walk. Neither of them were marathon runners, and they needed to take a walking breakfast. 

 

*****

 

“Holy motherfucking shit.” Red Tourette stood outside of the stockpile, staring at the airship blaring a faint message in the distance. She’d finished Tom in the night, and Ian and Angie slept in their new bunks as the watched the vessel of the Brotherhood of Steel dock over by the Boston Airport through her rifle’s magnified scope, the airship still tiny in her eyes that far away. Talking to the short, skinny woman on her right, she asked, “So, you said that it’s a Brotherhood of Steel airship?”

 

The woman nodded. If not for the glaring, hateful eyes on the woman, and the people she hung around, Tourette might have mistaken her for a girl. “Yeah. Some people call ‘em bucket heads. And I thought that the Brotherhood didn’t have much influence north of New Jersey, but there’s that blimp. Just hangin’ on the horizon.”

 

The redheaded woman ran her hand through her stringy hair behind her deformed iron mask. “Shitting fuck. Now we don’t just have the resurrection of the Minutemen in our fuckin’ territory and an organized fuck you group with the Gunners, we’ve got the Brotherhood of Steel actually giving a shit about the Commonwealth. Fuck!” She thumbed at her nose and paced. “Jenby, I gotta get plans moving, fast. Go grab Ben, and meet me in my bedroom.” 

 

*****

 

“Should’ve known Kellogg was with the Institute,” Nick Valentine told Janice and Cait, pacing back and forth in front of them in his office while he rubbed at the remainder of his chin with his skeletal hand. “Operated clean and efficient, just like an Institute laser gun. Good onya for putting him in the ground, you two.”

 

Cait was only paying half attention, sitting up against the wall and taking slow sips of water from her new canteen as she waited out the pounding headache that the Psycho withdrawal was giving her. Fuck, she needed a hit. 

 

“You sound like you doubted us, Nick,” Janice said with a playful grin. “I’m a ghost, you know. I can do anything I put my mind to and all that bullshit.”

 

The synth thumbed in Cait’s direction where she had her palms pressed against her temples. “What’s up with her? They didn’t… do anything to her, did they?”

 

Shaking her head, Janice gave Cait a concerned look that she didn’t see from behind her squeezed shut eyelids. “No, nothing more than give her a burn that she’s healed already. I think that we just need to visit Solomon for some, ah, supplements.”

 

Nick’s brow knitted, though he didn’t have actual eyebrows. “Look, Janice, I know you like helping out the lost lambs and everything, but this broad’s bad news. I can tell just looking at her, and I haven’t got any software you don’t.”

 

Cait said, “Fuck you, too, ya bucket of bolts,” in a quiet voice, though to her it sounded like screaming. “Just get me some Addictol or Psycho and I’ll be right as rain for a few days.”

 

As she shifted again, Nick let out a sympathetic sigh and whispered, “Look, her arm’s got more track marks than skin at this point. She’s shaking, she’s pale, sweaty, got a fever. The girl can’t last much longer like this.”

 

The Vault Dweller pinched the bridge of her nose. “I’m not leaving her here to get kicked out by McDonough like the Ghouls. Like you said, she can’t last much longer like this. I need to help her, Nick.”

 

“You try and save everyone dying of addiction or withdrawal then you’re gonna end up with a lot of heartbreak, kid. Sure, go get her some Addictol, but eventually she’ll have to try and get clean, and she’s past the point of weaning her off. It’s either tie her together with drugs and shoelaces until she keels over at forty or figure something else out.”

 

“I’ve lasted since I was twenty two on drugs and shoelaces, dick, and I’ll last a while longer.” The headache had begun to fade, and Cait forced herself to her feet with a groan. “Janice, you want to run with me to Solomon’s?”

 

When she looked to Janice, though, her friend had her face in a hand. “Sure. Sure, yeah, let’s go get you some meds.”

 

Cait didn’t wait for either of them, wanting to get out of that fucking synth’s house already. Sometimes, Nick Valentine was good for something, but right then, she wanted to see what his insides looked like, and she hadn’t even touched any Psycho yet. She wobbled on her feet a little, and leaned against a sheet metal wall down the alley from Valentine’s Detective Agency. A guy digging a latrine ditch well down the alley gave her an odd look as she swayed into place. She brought her eyes back around to look back at the Agency as Janice stepped out, saying, “Yeah, thanks for the advice, dad.”

 

“Y’know,” Cait said as Janice strode down the alleyway towards her, “I heard about a Vault, southwest of here. Vault 95. It’s set up for junkies or somethin’, and they’ve got some magical cure-all shite like Vaults tend to, right?”

 

“I mean, the one I was in had some pretty wild stuff, sure.” Janice thumbed down the hallway towards the market, adjusting her laser rifle’s strap in conjunction with her bag’s strap, both hanging heavy on her flannel. “Doctor Sun might be able to help us out, if you think that’s alright? Or we could just go to Solomon. Thing is, I’m not to great with the dosage for Addictol, and-”

 

“Nah. Doc Sun would flush my system, and I’d pretty much be on chemo for a few hours. And it won’t fix my problems, anyway. With the Addictol, I’ll be able to make it through the Vault before I get sick again.”

 

“Cait, I need to get to Fort Independence before too much longer. We’ve got a Minutemen operation, big one, soon. How far away is Vault 95?”

 

“Only about six miles of typical Commonwealth shite. Southwest, like I said. It’s only about a half a mile from the Glowing Sea, I think. It was a Pre-War Map that I got my info from.” They started for the main thoroughfare of Diamond City. It sat, not coincidentally, on the old baseball diamond of Fenway Park, though next to no grass grew there anymore, as people were constantly trampling the muddy ground, either going to the chem vendor, Solomon, the noodle robot Takahashi, or any of the other several vendors. 

 

Several people had lined up outside of Solomon’s already. Janice and Cait took their spot at the back, Janice with an arm around Cait’s shoulders to make sure that she could stay on her feet. “Well, Cait, I do have to go to Fort Independence before much longer. Colonel’s expecting me. And we’ve got to talk to Piper, too.”

 

“I keep on hearing about this Piper girl, who is she?”

 

“One of my first friends in the Commonwealth. She runs Publick Occurrences here in Diamond City. I thought I told you that?”

 

“Maybe ya did,” Cait said, looking far less abashed than another woman might have while talking to the woman that she was crushing on. “I forget lots of things. Part of the whole being high all the time thing, probably.” They’d just made it to the front of the line as she said this, and Solomon looked up from where he was stashing his caps, his blond beard having gotten longer since the last time that Cait saw him. Both that and the gaunt look on his face made him look older than he really was. 

 

“Sounds like a helluva lifestyle,” Solomon said in his relaxed, easy going tone. “Maybe I can get you something to explore that some more?”

 

Janice shook her head. “No. We just need some Addictol. Trying to get miss redhead here clean.”

 

The chem vendor shrugged. “Hey, that’s got its merits, too. A solid dose of Addictol is gonna run you about a hundred and twenty caps, miss, uh…”

 

“Janice. How about a hundred? That sound fair to you?”

 

“Hundred and fifteen.”

 

“Eighty and a Stimpak.”

 

“You got it.”

 

After Janice traded him the materials that she said she would, Solomon reached over into his strongbox and handed Janice an inhaler similar to the ones that were full of fumes of brahmin dung called Jet, but the Addictol looked more clinically produced, and had a stamp in the plastic on the back labeling it as Addictol. The Vault Dweller handed it to Cait as they stepped away, and she wasted no time in huffing it. Almost immediately, the clouds in her mind started to fade away, and over the next half hour, the flop sweats and pallid complexion would fade, as well. 

 

“Sorry, Janice,” Cait told her as they took a seat at the bar in front of the noodle making and selling robot named Takahashi. “Now my mouth’s going to taste like medicine.”

 

Janice let out a small huff and showed a smirk as she flagged down Takahashi. “Let’s get some udon for you, then, so you can taste as greasy as you look.” While she ordered, Cait chuckled to herself.

 

“I take deep and personal offense to that, Janice. You’re lucky I don’t mention how bony your hands were when they were all over me.” She nudged Janice’s ribs as Takahashi slug them their noodles and Janice handed him the caps she owed. “I’m just kiddin’ with you, Janice. Don’t think I’ve seen a girl as pretty as one o’ you Pre-War girls.”

 

Just as Cait started to get into her noodles, she noticed a woman in a red trench coat with a press cap over her surprisingly well maintained black locks take a seat beside Janice. “Well, sorry I don’t have any makeup to really wow you, then, Cait.” After saying this, Janice turned to the woman on her right. “Well, fancy seeing you here, Piper. We were just going to go chat with you after we finished our noodles.”

 

“Well, everyone needs some of Takahashi’s every once in awhile,” Piper informed them, a toothy grin on her face after she said it. “What did you want to talk about? You found that guy yet? You know the one.”

 

Janice nodded and thumbed over her shoulder at Cait as she said, “Yeah, Cait here helped me cook him to a crisp.” The redhead gave Piper a chin jut of recognition over the mouthful of noodles. “And you? How’s McDonough cooperating with the papers you’ve been selling?”

 

“Well, I think he’s just glad that I’ve been focusing on other things than him lately,” Piper told her. “And nice job taking care of that guy. I was a little worried, there. He sounded dangerous.”

 

A mocking smirk crossed Janice’s face. “Oh, Piper Wright was concerned for me. It’s like you like me or something.”

 

The woman in the press cap winced. “Oh, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. You’re a good coworker, but a little brutal for me. So what did you want to talk about?”

 

Converse to the playfulness that had been written on Janice’s face before, she wore a pensive expression now. “Well, I know where my kid is. The worst place he could be, aside maybe from a Super Mutant den. And the only person that would have known how to get in I burned to death.”

 

Cait swallowed and spoke up before Piper could respond. “It’s not like he would have just surrendered or some shite. He was a murderer, not just a merc. And arrogant as all get out. We did the world a service, putting that man out of commission.”

 

“Be that as it may,” Piper said, “I remember our friendly neighborhood detective telling me about a place he sometimes takes witnesses to help them remember details about events that he investigates. Some place in Goodneighbor, I think. The Memory Hut?”

 

“Memory Den,” Cait corrected. Janice gave her a quizzical look, and Cait scoffed. “Janice, you know me. Do you really think a gal like me wouldn’t have spent time in Goodneighbor?”

 

“I just figured Hancock’s not super fond of dangerous redheads that aren’t his bodyguard,” Janice said. “So, Piper. The one man that knew anything is dead. Why did you mention the Memory Den?”

 

“Well, there’s a chance. Maybe. If you brought his brain there, they could analyze his memories? I know, I know, it’s grisly, but it’s gotta be worth a shot.” The woman in the trench coat shrugged and gave Janice a sympathetic look. “And hey, if it doesn’t work, it’s not like you are set back by it all that much, right?”

 

“I guess. I’ll go to Goodneighbor first, see if it’s even possible. And, at first, I wanted to hang Kellogg’s head on my belt, anyway. Didn’t because I figured it wouldn’t go over well with some of my more civilized friends, but at least now I have an excuse to. Assuming the radroaches haven’t sucked his brains out through his nose by the time I get to him.”

 

Piper smacked her lips and stared hard at her noodles. “That’s a heck of an image. Thanks, Janice.” 

 

“You’re welcome, Piper. Now, if you’ll let me, I’d like to eat these noodles. Udon’s no good cold.”

 

Cait and Janice made it to Goodneighbor by evening. Remembering the last time they walked into Goodneighbor, Cait suddenly wished that Janice still had her Power Armor. Power Armor just makes everything easier. KL-EO greeted them, and sold them enough ammunition to last for a few days, so the weight in Janice’s bag only strained on the strap rather than tearing it. Afterwards, they found the Memory Den, the foyer being the nicest place in Goodneighbor, probably. 

 

Cait found the owner of the Den, Irma, lounging on a well cushioned red love stead as she entered. “Sorry, girls,” she said, looking up from her magazine to gesture at the four filled memory loungers about the room. “Den’s all full. If there’s anything else I can do for you, just let me know. I’d be happy to serve.”

 

As Janice started speaking, Cait cocked her head slightly at the sexual undertone to Irma’s statement. Of course, considering her cleavage baring outfit and the hot red tone of everything she wore, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to Cait. “Not here for the loungers today, Irma. Just looking for Doctor Amari. Got something to ask her.”

 

“I assume it’s technical stuff,” she said, and glanced over her shoulder. “She’s downstairs, through the back. If you want a blast from the past, though, all you’ve gotta do is ask and wait.”

 

“Thanks, Irma,” Janice said, leading the way to the back towards the stairs. Her tone didn’t sound particularly thankful, and once they were on the way down the dim staircase, she looked over her shoulder at Cait and said, “Don’t get any funny ideas with that girl.”

 

While stepping into the well lit laboratory beneath the Memory Den, Cait just threw up her hands and shrugged in response to Janice’s statement. A short woman in a pristine lab coat turned around as they walked in, hands on her hips. Janice seemed to shrink beneath the woman’s gaze for a second, as though she were a daughter who knew she’d done wrong, and saw that her mother had just found out. After a moment, though, Janice stood up straight, and the woman spoke with a slight accent Cait had trouble placing for a moment. “Janice. What exactly are you doing down here?”

 

Cait snapped as she realized that the woman was Indian, the accent coinciding with her skin tone. Dr. Amari glared at her for a half a second before looking back to Janice. “Doctor,” Janice said, “I’ve got a question. Now, I know that it’s weird, and may not go over super well, but, um, do you think you could dig memories out of a dead man’s head?”

 

Cait had to resist a chuckle at her phrasing. When Dr. Amari responded, though, she sounded anything but tickled. “Are you kidding? Aside from the fact that you’re asking me to defile a corpse, we need active synapses to read off of,” she said, and Cait tuned her out as she continued on into some technical mumbo-jumbo.

 

“Doctor, Nick Valentine told me you can work miracles. Please, I need this. I’ll pay you whatever you want, dig you a CAT scanner out of a dead hospital, whatever it takes, I just need this man’s memories.” Another woman might have pled, but despite Janice’s choice of words, she almost sounded like she was threatening the doctor.

 

Dr. Amari palmed her forehead. “Well, I’ll need the brain. And bring Valentine with you when you come back; I want to hear that this is alright with him, too.”

 

As Janice gave her a solid affirmative, Cait just flashed her some thumbs up and walked out of the room. Damn, Addictol made her feel weird sometimes. Upstairs, from behind Irma, she could almost see down her robe’s front. Before she could crane her head to get a better look, though, Janice stepped up behind her, pushing her forward into the room. “Did you have a good visit, girls?” Irma asked.

 

“Fantastic,” Janice said in a dry voice as she and Cait stepped out onto the street. Once outside, she turned to Cait and sighed. “Cait, I just realized something.”

 

“You’ve got too many things to do and too little time to do them?”

 

“Aside from that. Cait, the Brotherhood of Steel have just arrived in the Commonwealth. That means that I have yet another faction to contend with, and contingency plans to set up, and diplomatic duties. Damn, I hate being general.” Suddenly, her friend had turned into someone on the verge of a breakdown, pacing back and forth, fingers bunching up repeatedly in her hair. “Preston can’t be general. He’s not cut out for it; hell, he told me that Colonel was way more responsibility than he could be trusted with, but shit, what else am I supposed to do?”

 

“Leave the bleedin’ hearts behind,” Cait said, and Janice stopped pacing, looking at her with much less unbelieving face than someone who wanted to be general would be wearing. “Let them fend for themselves and look out for yourself. I’ve got to say, you’ve done some incredible things, and most people can hardly take care of themselves in this world. So tell Preston to find someone else for his general, and just take care of Sanctuary. It’s a hell of a lot less responsibility.”

 

Janice shook her head and sighed, her shoulders sagging. “I can’t do that. I’m in too deep already, Cait. If I give up this power now, then the Minutemen would collapse on themselves again.” She looked around at the junkies and Ghouls and men in patchy suits on the street, and told Cait, “I accepted the job in the first place because I saw it as an opportunity to get more information on my son, more power to get him back, and I got a little of both, and had to dedicate half of my life since then to keeping the Minutemen running.”

 

The redhead gave her friend a sympathetic smile. “Janice, we’re only a few steps away from getting him back. We’re about to find out how to get to him, and after you’ve got him back, I have no doubt that Preston would forgive you for wanting to step back so you can take care of him. Now, come on. Let’s get to Fort Independence and plan on how best to kick the shit out of those Gunners.”

 

“In the morning.” The sun’s rays had already turned golden with the sunset. “Let’s go find a bed to sleep in.” She didn’t wait for Cait to respond, grabbing her by the upper arm and dragging her towards Goodneighbor’s hotel. Cait wrenched herself out of Janice’s grip by the time they got there, but more from reflex than for any worry about where Janice was dragging her.

 

After the grumpy old woman at the front desk took Janice’s caps and directed them towards their room, Janice led the way upstairs towards their hall. She’d said maybe ten words since starting to drag Cait along, and all of them to the hotel lady. “Why’re you moving so fast?” Cait asked as Janice dragged her by the hand into the room, and got her answer when Janice slammed the door behind her and shoved her up against the thin wall, lips suddenly against each other’s. The Vault Dweller’s hands were all over her, from her lower cheeks to her facial cheeks, and Cait didn’t question it, tenderly stroking and caressing the pockets of soft on Janice’s body, pointedly ignoring her breasts, though, respectful of Janice’s slow request. After a half a minute of probing Cait’s mouth with her tongue more thoroughly than an alien would probe the other end, Janice pulled back a couple of inches from Cait’s face, mouth smacking wet. 

 

“I want you so damned bad,” Janice said, squeezing Cait’s bum and making her breathing more labored. “God, I want you to help me relax the the point that I’m nothing but a pile of goo.”

 

A toothy, goofy grin crossed Cait’s chapped lips. “I’d love to oblige you, Janice, but you said-”

 

“Forget what I said,” Janice said, Cait feeling her hot breath on her lips. “I thought about it, and I’ll unwind more while fucking you now than I would fucking you in a month.”

 

The Irish woman shrugged. “If you say so.” Then she hoisted Janice up by her ribs and dropped her onto the bed, which consisted of a very nice double bed frame and two dirty, bare mattresses. Janice’s elbow smacked the head of the bed, though, and she groaned for a second, Cait covering her mouth.

 

At Cait’s standing there, stunned, Janice said, “Who said to stop? I didn’t break my arm.”

 

A feral growl leaked out of Cait’s mouth. She landed with her knees on either side of Janice’s hips, leaning her bum gently on Janice’s lower abdomen as she furiously struggled to unbutton Janice’s flannel shirt. The Vault Dweller cut her short, taking her hands and sliding them beneath the few buttons already undone to her braless breasts. Cait tore a breathy moan from Janice’s throat and prompted an arched back by pinching and stroking her nipples. As she did this, Cait leaned forward and started sucking on Janice’s neck, urging her to moan a little more. 

 

A couple of minutes of this passed, and when Cait pulled back, she found Janice working her own jeans down to her knees. With a momentary chuckle, Cait lifted up a hand and asked, “Want to see what else my trigger finger can do?” She sucked on it as Janice’s hands ran up the back of her tank top, hoisting it up over her little breasts and individually countable ribs. When she slid her hand down to stroke Janice’s wettening folds with her index finger after digging beneath a pile of black pubic hair, Janice gnawed on her lower lip. 

 

Janice’s hands gently kneaded and stroked Cait’s nipples and Cait let out a breathy moan of her own. The tip of her finger just kept stroking Janice’s slit, though, and when Janice tried to hump her hips forward to get Cait’s hand inside her, Cait moved with them, pulling back to continue. Janice groaned out of frustration and Caid said, “Take it slow, Janice. Don’t want to wake the whole hotel, do we?” 

 

“I thought you wanted to fuck me?”

 

“Oh, I do, believe me. Self control is a virtue, Janice.”

 

The Vault Dweller twisted Cait’s nipples like radio knobs, drawing a quick yelp as a burst of sharp, stretching pain shot out, almost like a bruise. Another growl leaked up from Cait’s throat. “Fine, if that’s how it is.” She slid her fingers up to the fleshy hood at the top of Janice’s slit, and pinched it tight between two fingers. Janice howled, back arching, and Cait let go after less than a second. “D’you think I could get you to come just by torturing you, Janice? I’ve done it before.” Cait leaned forward to lick some of the delectable, earthy, salty sweat from Janice’s forehead, and her partner brought her hand down and around to grind her fingers against Cait’s already sopping slit through her cargos. Then Cait stiffened and gasped, and Cait said, “Fuck, I want your fingers in me.” Pulling her hand away from Janice’s slit, she started to undo her pants, but Janice grabbed her wrists.

 

“Big, badass Cait’s got a schoolgirl crush on me, so I’m going to make you come like my girl did when I was a schoolgirl.” When she let go of Cait’s hands, Janice moved her own hands back to Cait’s crotch and breast, respectively. With one hand, Cait slid back down to caress Janice’s entrance more reverently, and with the other, she stroked and twirled Janice’s hair between her fingers. “Fifteen feet away from my mother, while we sat in the living room, listening to the radio, she made me come through my pants. She looked almost half as beautiful as you do up there, Cait.”

 

“Oh, please,” Cait breathed as she Janice stroked her harder through her pants. “I can’t hold a… a candle… to you Pre, Pre-War girls.” Then Janice found the spot through her pants that started a shock of sensation through her, and Cait stopped stroking Janice’s folds, closing her eyes and moaning aloud. 

 

How did this woman now just where to press? Where to apply the most pressure, how to roll her fingers in that rhythm and with just the right amount of force to make Cait squirm and gasp? After all, hadn’t she married a man? Cait didn’t ask these questions, simply rode it out, bucking her hips against her stroking fingers, whipping her tank top off over her head and kneading her own breasts as Janice juiced her enough to make someone else think she’d soiled her pants. When Cait came, she came in shudders and gasps, pinching at her teats and tugging them, her face contorted in a way that, in a different situation, would have looked like agony. After her hips stopped twitching, she bent forward and mashed her lips against Janice’s gingerly stroking Janice’s sopping slit through the soaked pubes there. 

 

Just as Cait was really starting to enjoy her gasps into her mouth and how Janice tasted, the Vault Dweller turned her head away, pressing Cait’s face down to her neck, a clear indication to give her another hickey. Cait lavished care upon the woman, squeezing and pressing on the folds around her ultimate entrance, and when, at last, she slipped her right index finger into Janice’s depths, the other woman’s back arched, and she cried out aloud as Cait thumbed her clit. She fucked her with slow, deliberate strokes, and when she’d find that rougher spot amongst the squishy folds, Janice would hump her finger. 

 

“How about another finger, lover?” Cait drew out the last word into three syllables, and Janice responded a couple seconds later, nodding vigorously. Kissing the sweat from Janice’s temple and neck, Cait wormed her middle finger inside with her index, swirling them about, and putting pressure on that rough spot at the same time she put pressure on her clit. After only about five swirls, each culminating in a love-button press and a stroke of that spot on the upper wall, Janice raked her nails down Cait’s back instead of just stroking her, yelping, followed by a gasp and furiously humping against Cait’s slow, circling in place fingers. Cait could feel her skin break in a couple of places, but ignored the pain, returning the favor with a bite on one of Janice’s hickeys, though nowhere nearly hard enough to actually hurt her.

 

Afterwards, Janice looked at Cait above her with fading lust in her eyes, but still gave the redhead a tender kiss. When their faces broke, Cait licked off the tangy, zesty juices on her fingers, and Janice giggled, slipping her hands underneath the waistband of Cait’s pants to stroke her bum. Cait slumped down to lay beside Janice, her head on Janice’s shoulder. “You’re beautiful, Cait. You know that, right?”

 

“Nah, that’s you, lover,” Cait said, one hand casually circling around Janice’s right areola. “My very own Pre-War pinup girl.” Looking up into Janice’s nearly black eyes, she said, “Just promise me something real quick, ok?”

 

Janice nodded. “Probably.”

 

“Don’t get wise and kick me to the curb too soon, alright?”

 

“Cait, I don’t think I could forgive myself if I only let that happen once. Now, then, let’s get to sleep and pretend that’s what I rented this room for.” 

 

“I could do that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, we start on one end of the explicit spectrum and end on the other. I was considering actually having them take it slow, but I figured that Cait would just try to get as much out of this as quickly as possible, before Janice inevitably got wise and broke up with her, and Janice would be open to the idea of early sex, as evidenced in the chapter. As always, thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy today's chapter!


	13. Unlucky Number

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lots of stuff happens

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I figure I ought to warn you guys, this chapter sorta needs a trigger warning. If you can't think of anything like that that would affect you a lot, then skip this set of notes, as it contains spoilers.
> 
>  
> 
> Trigger warning for alcohol abuse and poisoning, and for cutting. If this prevents you from reading the chapter, but you still want to know what happens, then leave a comment and I will put it in the notes for the next chapter.

Usually, when people crested the hill walking towards Sanctuary’s foot bridge, Mary would point her submachine gun at them, but from a distance, these two looked like children. That is, until they came within a hundred feet and she saw that the 4’8” lady had breasts and the 5’4” man walking next to her had a proper five o’clock shadow. Of course, they could still be fifteen, but she knew that fifteen was more than old enough to have a few kills under your belt. Once they came within fifty feet, Mary drew a bead on them and called, “What’s your business here?”

 

The short man stepped forward, lifting up his hands. “We just want a roof over our heads and some clean water. Whatever food you want to give us is welcome, too. Think y’all can do that?”

 

“What are you good at?” She drummed the fingers on her gun, but didn’t turn it all the way away. These two could still be raiders. Just well spoken ones. With a southern accent. “We don’t just take anyone.”

 

They exchanged a look, and the woman spoke up. “I’m good at kids. You need a nursery, I’m your gal.”

 

The man spoke after her. “I mean, I’m young, I’m strong. This town grew up really fast, there must still be some construction projects you could use some extra hands for.”

 

Eh, fuck it. They’re kids. All the raiders that Mary had seen were wild eyed adults, stronger than most, that or high, and shooting at her. Raiders didn’t do things like send kids in to be spies. They did things like rape and mutilate kids. “Hang on until the guard shift changes. I want to hang out with you, help you get settled.”

 

“You got it, ma’am,” the man said. 

 

*****

 

Cait and Janice had come near to Fort Independence, setting up on a rooftop a couple of late raiders had ambushed them from, sitting next to each other, leaning on each other, sharing a couple of roasted bits of dog the raiders had just finished cooking when they started shooting to break their fast. After a couple of minutes, Janice leaned back on her greasy hands, chewing over her last bite, and said, “So, Cait. We’re trying to be lovers, so, why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

 

Cait stopped chewing and hesitated a moment before swallowing hard. “Erm, there ain’t a lot to tell. Parents were assholes, previous lovers weren’t a whole lot better. I don’t have a favorite color, and I have no idea what my birthday is because I’ve never celebrated it. My favorite drink is actually Old World vodka, and I don’t know about a favorite food. I’d certainly love to eat you,” she said, grinning as she stuffed the last chunk of food into her mouth. 

 

The Vault Dweller giggled for a half second, but her expression looked like the humor didn’t hit her like it should have. “Maybe after the next time I bathe. If you got anywhere near me down there, you’d gag, probably.”

 

Shaking her head, Cait grinned at her. “Naw. You might have a sensitive nose, but I’m a Wastelander born and bred, a little bit of an odd stink ain’t anything. Just so long as you do bathe sometimes. I mean, I’ve been, what, a week and a half?”

 

“How about this: when we get back to Sanctuary, I’ll scrub you down myself. It can be a nice experience.” The pair shared a grin.

 

“I can’t wait.”

 

They pressed on to Fort Independence. The huge walls loomed over them before eleven in the morning, and Cait could see the radio tower poking up over them even as she approached the ten foot tall structure. Well, the junk fencing was ten feet tall, filling the gaps between the turrets and twenty foot solid stone walls. A man with a laser musket leaned over the fence, calling, “Who are you and what’s your business?”

 

“I’m your fucking general!” Janice called. “And I’m here with a girl who’s killed about fifty times the people you have, Victor, so open the gates!” While the young man scrambled to go get the gate open with the other guards up on the wall, Janice gave Cait a smirk. “How d’you like that?”

 

Another grin mirrored Janice’s from Cait’s face. “I love seein’ you in charge. With you leading, the Gunners don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell.”

 

By the time the gates had closed behind them, and African-American man in a tan longcoat with an odd, wide brimmed hat was striding briskly towards them, extended laser musket in hand. “General. It’s good to see you.”

 

“Likewise, colonel. Any plans yet?”

 

“Well, we’ve got two access points to where they’re dug into the Auto Wreckers. Both are choke points, both not wide enough for three people to walk abreast. There’s a trench on the south side of it that someone could sneak along during the night, but what we really need are some snipers. They have elevation; they have some fortifications on a partially collapsed overpass; but the Saugus Ironworks is what we really need to take if we are to use snipers. There’s a problem with that, though.”

 

Janice placed her hands on her hips and sighed. “The Forged. Some of the toughest raiders in the Commonwealth own Saugus right now, and if we take Saugus with the Minutemen, we’ll have to wait a while to regroup enough to attack Hub City Auto Wreckers. Dammit, I’m used to just being able to soften them up with Power Armor and having everyone else mop them up after they’ve pissed their pants. How many soldiers with automatic weapons have we got?”

 

“Excuse me,” Cait said, stepping forward, “but I’d like a refresher on just why the hell we’re even doing this again.”

 

“They burned some of our farms,” Janice said. “The one near the old national guard training yard, and the one just south of Saugus with the kid that decided to run off and join the Forged. On the plus side, the Forged won’t try and take Hub City after the Gunners and the Minutemen have both taken casualties. I killed too many of them a few weeks ago for that.” She looked up from her tapping foot back to Preston. “How many Forged are at Saugus right now?”

 

“Just about twenty,” Preston told her. “The same for Hub City Auto Wreckers.”

 

Cait interrupted again. “Let me go scout ahead. I’ve got a pretty fantastic sniper rifle with me. I can pick off some of the boys at Saugus from the farm south of it, probably. You oughta be able to help me with yer laser musket, colonel.”

 

“No need,” a woman with a raspy voice said, striding across the muddy courtyard of Fort Independence towards them in ancient military fatigues. “Colonel Garvey, if you let me plan the attack on Hub City, I can guarantee we won’t lose more than ten men. If we put some people in the trench to lob some grenades in, then we can push in in a pincer attack while they’re distracted, with some shotguns and submachine guns. After we clear out a little spot, we can get some boys with our missile launchers we got out of the excavated armory to shoot at that fucker with the Power Armor on the overpass. Or even better, your fiery redhead here can snipe him and we can reclaim the Power Armor.”

 

“That’s a good plan, Captain Shaw,” Janice said, “but the problem isn’t that they’ll gun us down as we run in, but rather that they’ll gun us down as we approach.”

 

“That’s what the distraction is for, general. Yeah, it’s pretty likely that the people in the trench will die, but that’s how it goes. We’ve got some Stimpaks to help with them, and we can charge in right after they get started, if we loop around, but just in case, general, I’d suggest you pick some people that don’t have close familial ties.”

 

A rueful smirk crossed Janice’s face. “Well, at least the high number of orphans in the Wasteland is a good thing for once.”

 

*****

 

Carrying the massive slingshot with the low yield nuclear bomb over his shoulder and staying close behind Zeus, Ian couldn’t believe his luck. Whether good or bad, he hadn’t decided yet. On the one hand, it’d be fucking awesome to launch a nuclear bomb, say that he’d done that. On the other, he might fuck up and blow himself up, or the Gunners at Mass Pike might see them coming and blow his head off, or when the overpass came down, the debris could very easily crush him. The nuclear slingshot’s design meant that he could reliably launch from a hundred and fifty yards away, which was way too close to be to a nuclear detonation in his opinion, and that’s not mentioning the hundred or so tons of concrete and steel collapsing at the site of the detonation.

 

Zeus held up a hand when they had two hundred yards between them and the pillars supporting the Mass Pike Interchange. The leader himself had no armaments other than a revolver on his hip, but aside from Ian’s ordnance, there was a woman with a missile launcher, and a man with a scoped bolt action rifle. The latter two were only there in case Ian fucked up, but dammit, he was going to get this right! “Ian,” Zeus said. “Push up a bit, to that blown out tree up there.” Zeus pointed to the one tree within sight, about a third of the way to the overpass. “As soon as you get that bomb launched, you run your ass off back here, with that fancy slingshot over your shoulder. Got it?”

 

Ian nodded, his heart hammering already as he jogged towards the tree. When he took a knee beside the tree, a couple of lasers scorched the ground around him, and he took a deep breath as he hefted the Fat Man. After a momentary fine tuning, he launched the payload and turned his eyes away. His eyelids flashed pink for a moment, and when he opened them, a neat little mushroom cloud had begun to form where the foremost pillar holding up Mass Pike Interchange was. Already, he could smell the rubble dust, and watched it begin to collapse on the vaporized base for a few seconds before turning round and rushing back towards Zeus and the others. A few laser beams came his way, but inaccurate, instead of scorching his flesh turning the dead grass around his feet to blackened, slightly aflame curls. 

 

“Nice job, Ian,” Zeus called over the cacophony in the background, crumbling stone almost drowning out the agonized and terrified screams. “I don’t envy the excavation crew that’ll be digging out Tourette’s Power Armor. 

 

Ian felt the adrenaline in his veins, his chest involuntarily puffing out with pride, as he thumbed over his shoulder, saying, “You mean I just did that for a suit of Power Armor?”

 

“No. You did it because Tourette wanted you to,” the woman with the missile launcher said, and knelt before sending a missile, screaming, away, at a couple of the few Gunners that had managed to not be in the wreckage. The man with the bolt action (a left handed model, oddly enough) finished off the rest of the people that had run, coughing, out of the cloud of smoke. A few of the wrecked cars exploded on the way down, as well, all contributing to the main mushroom cloud over the remains of Mass Pike Interchange.

 

*****

 

While Cait paced around in the armory, chewing her fingernails, Janice walked in, and Cait stopped, looking up and feeling her heart stop before immediately beginning pounding. “Uh, mornin’ Janice. I’ve, um, I’ve got somethin’ to say to you-”

 

“You’re not fighting.” The tone of Janice’s voice revealed her slight disappointment and definitive knowledge of the truth of the statement. “You’ll fight for food or loot, but not a cause. You’re not a soldier. And that’s fine, that’s you. You aren’t a Minuteman.”

 

With a little sympathetic smile, Cait shook her head. “‘Fraid I’m not. I hope you do well out there, but I heard some of them talking about how they don’t even loot the bodies, and there’s no way I’m fighting if I’m not getting anything out of it.”

 

Janice stopped in front of her with a quick nod. “That’s fine. I don’t expect you to become a soldier for me. That being said, I don’t simply want you to be lounging about in the courtyard while people are fighting and dying a half a mile away. Load magazines, collect shell casings, help them reinforce the northwest wall, whatever, just so long as you’re making yourself useful.” The general started for the door, but stopped and turned, lifting a hand and saying, “Also, just try not to kill anyone you don’t have to while I’m gone, alright?”

 

“You got it.” As her lover walked off to battle, though, Cait couldn’t help but feel like that was it. Jance had just realized how shitty a person Cait was, and that was what that conversation was, was her trying to convince herself that Cait would ever look out for someone not named Cait or Janice. And she couldn’t.

 

*****

 

Mary couldn’t help but feel like there was something up. Sure, they behaved themselves, sure, they reacted with shock to Strong when he said they looked delicious, sure, they got to work on an excavation project as soon as Mary gave them one, but there was something up with these short people. The woman had said her name was Anju, and the man was Paul. Paul constantly had his neck craned, looking around, never letting his eyes linger on a single location long. Anju kept her head down, but Mary couldn’t help but think she did it on purpose. To throw off the scent. 

 

As she thought this, she sat in the living room of one of the half in tact houses of Sanctuary, listening to Orange Colored Sky by way of Diamond City radio, and mending a tear in an ancient tee shirt. After the closing chord played, Sturges spoke from the doorway, and Mary noticed his muscled form standing there. “God, if Travis doesn’t get some new music soon, I swear I’ll just shake him by his ears.” The mechanic made a vigorous movement as though he was doing just that, and Mary tittered a little. He grinned at her, and wiped a piece of hair from his forehead up into his pompadour. “I mean, the first few times, I loved those songs, but you can only hear, “flash, bam, alakazam,” so many times before wanting the words to be please, God, kill me.” He sang the last four words in the style of the song, drawing another momentary titter from Mary. 

 

“So what’re you doing here, Sturges?”

 

He produced the pipe submachine gun that Mary had been using and handed it to her, a longer magazine extending out of the side, a more comfortable stalk attached, and the wooden foregrip polished. “Got your baby all fixed up. Only real problem was that you needed some re-cut wood, downside of having it so close to the barrel and firing mechanism, but that didn’t take much time out of my day.”

 

Mary stuck her tongue in her cheek, remembering where she’d stashed her caps. “How much do I owe you, Sturges?”

 

His canvas shoes kicked each other. “Oh, I don’t know. How about dinner? Or maybe a dance?”

 

It’s All Over (But the Crying) by the Inkspots had just come on, and Mary stood up, grinning. “Oh, hell yes. This is my favorite one Diamond City plays.” She set down her gun in the armchair she’d been sitting in. “Perfect for a slow dance. Unless you’re too scared of me?” Even as she said this, she shot him an approximation of a seductive look that probably just came off as her needing a nap. 

 

By way of a response, Sturges wrapped a strong, callused hand around her somewhat less so hand and placed his other hand firm on her hip. She reached up to his broad shoulders, almost having to go awkwardly high, as they swayed to the crooning of the Inkspots. Feeling a little silly, she slid her thumb over the strap of his denim overalls, firm muscle on either side just beneath tanned skin. About halfway through the song, Mary interrupted. 

 

“You know, there’s a big fight going on right now. Minutemen vs. Gunners, over at Hub City Auto Wreckers. If I weren’t hurt, I’d be fighting over there right now. Good chance I’d be dead.” 

 

Sturges gave her a reassuring pat on her hip and she smiled into his chest. “Well, you’re not. And with that piece in your chair, you probably won’t be for a long time.”

 

Mary thought of a dirty joke, but kept it to herself, her face growing a little warm. “I appreciate it, Sturges.” The song started to die down, and she pulled back. “You know, though, you’ve got to tinker some more and I’ve got to finish mending this shirt.”

 

“The tools and the shirt can wait,” he said, grinning at her. “Not like we can’t take a bit of time to do some more dancing.” From his tone, and a bit of hope, Mary could tell that he didn’t really mean dancing. “That is, if you want to.”

 

She looked down, and wondered what those taut muscles must feel like beneath his overalls. “Oh, I think I could do a bit of dancing. For a while.”

 

Sturges grinned. “Music to my ears. Well, along with the actual music.”

 

Mary giggled. As she inhaled afterwards, she could smell that man smell, that musk, that gathered in his armpits and crotch when he worked long days like he had, and she tried to keep from falling over as she went weak in the knees.

 

*****

 

The worst thing was that the moonshine Cait shamed herself with wasn’t even good. It tasted exactly like paint, and Cait knew what that tasted like, as she’d huffed quite a bit of it in her time, and accidentally gotten a taste of it more than once. She hated herself, though, and wanted quite desperately to forget that Janice would kick her out as soon as she found her, so Cait drank until, inevitably, she passed out. 

 

When she woke up, the pungent, acidic taste of vomit had drowned her mouth, she was coughing, and she felt someone pressing on her sternum hard enough that she worried it might break for a half a second, before she realized that she couldn’t breathe. Still, she tried to say, “Get yer hands off me,” while shoving, but she only managed to touch the shoulders of the person as she coughed out enough bile to dissolve a diamond. Some had already come across her cheek, but after that cough, she felt a lock of her red hair become stained with bile. When, at last, she’d coughed enough to inhale, she sucked at the air harder than she’d ever sucked at a hit of Jet. Her throat made this wheezing sound like it was too thin to get all the air she wanted. The second inhalation was better, and she coughed a few more times, got out a bit more bile from her lungs, by the time she was able to lay down on her back, panting, and seeing a complete stranger sitting next to her. 

 

“I don’t know you,” the slim man with the curly, black beard said, leaning back on his hands. “What’re you doin’ in the Castle?”

 

“I’m with Janice,” Cait said, and groaned. “Your general. I can’t believe I’m askin’ this, but do you have any water?”

 

The man pulled a canteen off of his belt and handed it to Cait, who got up on one elbow to drink deep from it and hand it back. “If you’re with the general, why’d you almost drink yourself to death in the armory just now?”

 

“I don’t gotta explain myself to you,” Cait said, and tried to get to her feet, but as she sat up, a brick smashed her skull to pieces, and she laid back down. “Fuckin’ Christ. That’s why I stick to the Jet more often than the poison. Fuck.” She rubbed at her temples with her palms. “Thanks for savin’ my arse, I guess. You gotta name?”

 

“Jon. And you? I can’t just call you that redheaded drunk.”

 

“Aw, fuck you,” Cait said, but without conviction. “I’m Cait. If you visited the Combat Zone while it was still standing, you’ll know me.” She squeezed her eyes shut, focusing on the rush of blood in her ears for a second before Jon responded. 

 

“I’ve never been there. I thought it was only for raiders?”

 

“It was. Then yer general busted in with her minigun and Power Armor and wasted every fucker in there but me. So she took me with her, felt just as sorry for me as she probably should have, with her morals an’ all. What about you, why aren’t you with the other bleedin’ hearts gettin’ shot?”

 

He turned and hefted up his right leg with a grunt, showing off a nice, padded peg leg for the last two thirds of his lower leg. “Not exactly in fighting shape. I can barely manage to hobble around the towers and walls of the Castle keeping watch. Bet you’re glad I was somehow fast enough to save you, though, huh?”

 

Cait shrugged on the floor. “Eh. I suppose. So, then, what d’you wanna do while we wait for the others to get back here and my head to quit feelin’ like a brahmin kicked it?”

 

Jon groaned as he stood up. “I’ll get you some bread. Help soak up some of that extra acid in your gut. I’ll come back with a rag, too, so you can start cleaning yourself and the floor up.”

 

A groan leaked from Cait’s mouth as her headache pounded once more through her head. “Fuckin’ fuck.”

 

“Yup.”

 

*****

 

After an while of alternating dancing and talking, Mary took a sweaty seat on her chair, shirt needing mending hanging over the back, submachine gun in her lap and Sturges folding glistening arms across his broad chest as he leaned against the wall. “I appreciate you putting up with my dancing,” Sturges said with a bashful grin. “In public, I’d never dance.”

 

“Well, you haven’t got any rhythm,” Mary said, “but your looks make up for it, in my opinion. People will be looking at your face instead of your feet.”

 

Sturges gave a nervous laugh and rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, it’s getting kinda late, isn’t it? Forgive me, but I don’t really want to spend the night tonight, either.”

 

Mary’s heart sank a little, but she nodded. “Could you talk to me for a bit, first?”

 

“Uh, sure, but I feel like it needs mentioning we already talked a couple hours-”

 

“I wanted to bring up some more serious stuff.” Reaching over, Mary turned down the upbeat song on the radio and set her gun on the end table by the radio. “If you don’t mind.”

 

“Nah, go ahead.”

 

Her lips sucked into her mouth for a second. “Well, you’ve dealt with some pretty serious loss back at Quincy. And I lost a couple of friends recently. If I had been more vigilant, if I hadn’t gotten hurt, then I could have saved them, but now Eddy and Lawrence in in the grave.” Her right fist clenched and landed in her left palm, and she couldn’t bring her eyes up to Sturges’s.

 

“Well, it ain’t your fault. Nobody in Sanctuary would say it is but maybe Marcy Long, and she’s just working through her own shit. And, if things were different, then they might be alive, but things are what they are. Nothin’ you can do about the past. As for me, I’ve been focusing on my work, on all that tinkering and fixing stuff. Keeps my mind off of things while I kinda process them.” Mary heard his voice get a little shaky as he said this, and Sturges hesitated. “What about the people that did ‘em in?”

 

“They’re feeding crows.”

 

“Well, that’s good, since you won’t be dwelling on revenge. Are you?”

 

While rubbing on her thigh and chewing the hell out of her lower lip, Mary sat back in her chair, admiring the woodwork Sturges had done for her gun. “Maybe. Maybe a bit. I wanted to go out with the Minutemen, get after those fucking Gunners, but Curie said I wasn’t good to go today. Somethin’ tells me, though, that if I had gone, I would’ve gotten killed. Or hurt worse. And I wouldn’t have cared about it because I don’t have any family or friends left.”

 

Mary saw Sturges lean forward slightly, talking with his hands, out of the corner of her eye. “Hey, I would’ve cared. And Curie would’ve, and Mama Murphy, heck, Strong would’ve, if only because he would’ve wanted to eat ya.” A dry chuckle burst, unwanted, out of his mouth. Mary kept staring at the floor.

 

“If you care so much about me, then why didn’t you accept my offer to take you to bed, Sturges?”

 

An exasperated sigh. “Because, dammit, Mary, I could tell somethin’ was up and I didn’t want to mess you up in the head anymore than whoever killed your friends did. D’you want some help, Mary? You need some?”

 

Mary shook her head and pressed again on her thigh, closing her eyes. “I’m good, Sturges. Promise.”

 

He threw up his hands and stood up, starting for the door. “Fine. Well, if you decide you do, then you know where to find me or Murphy. And, you know, I do care about you, because you’re fine as hell and if you were healthy I’d have gone with you to bed in an instant.” Leaving Mary with her ears and face burning, he left the building. After he closed the door, she squeezed her eyes shut again, ears roaring with blood as she pressed the half-healed cuts on her thigh and relished in the sensation, any sensation beside that slight lusty twinge she got for Sturges and the dead weight that settled on her chest whenever she thought about her Eddy or Lawrence.

 

She sat there, focusing on the sharp pain and considering running the needle with which she’d been mending the shirt through her skin for several minutes before she heard the gunfire from the direction of the gate.


	14. Things Going Wrong and One Thing Right

Though she was loathe to draw herself from the reverie, Mary moved quickly, grabbing her submachine gun and an extra magazine. As she stepped out onto the street, a hundred and a half yards from the gate, she could hear the repeated, booming report of the turrets by the gate. She moved between alleyways and backyards towards the front, down the hill, hearing agonized screams of men and women alike between the massive bursts of fire from the turrets. 

 

A hundred yards from the gate, she took cover behind a boulder, and looked down the street, getting a grasp on the situation. The gates were open. Raiders had taken over the first fifty yards or so, with a couple of them manning the turrets. Three people lay dead or dying in the street, and between bursts of turret fire, Mary realized that the screams weren’t coming from people fighting. She leaned around her cover and laid a raider making for the armory about ten yards behind Mary flat on his back. A thought occurred to her, and she took off across the street towards the armory. 

 

When she flung open the doors, two men were fist-fighting over the minigun in the corner, and someone started to bring around a combat shotgun in her direction from the stairs immediately to the left of the door. Mary moved faster, though, and filled her chest cavity with six bullets, knocking her down before she could do anything. By then, though, the two in the corner had noticed her, and a bullet grazed her arm as she turned and sprayed the both of them, tearing holes through the wall in the armory. After doing this, she sprinted towards the minigun.

 

As she leaned down to grab it, she felt several pellets lodge themselves in her outer right thigh, and her back arched with the sudden, searing pain while she cried out. The next shot, thankfully, tore through the ceiling as Mary turned around, and she unleashed the last ten bullets in her magazine at the raider who had taken the shotgun from the dead one on the stairs. Most of them ended up in the stairs, but she managed to put three in the belly of the raider, and she collapsed, groaning. 

 

Mary hurried back across the room and shoved the shotgun through the handle of the door, which one would usually have to pull to open. Flinging open a military trunk, she slapped a helmet onto her head and strapped on a few pieces of ceramic combat armor, accentuating the burning pain in her shoulder and thigh, but her adrenaline pushing her through it. After turning herself into as close as a walking tank as she could manage without a suit of Power Armor, Mary hefted the minigun, throwing the massive box of ammunition backpack style over her shoulders. The weight of it dragged her down as she limped back to the door, but not much as yanked the combat shotgun out of the handle and shoved the door open. 

 

When she did, she found something resisting her, and when she had it open, found Marcy Long lying on the ground, coughing and wheezing for air as she drowned in her own blood. Mary pushed the thought out of her mind, instead arming the minigun and turning a raider man chasing a bleeding child through the street into mincemeat. Afterwards, she turned towards the gates, and shredded the turrets, along with the people manning them. By the time she’d killed the second one, they got off a few shots in her direction, but they skidded off of the street.

 

Out of the corner of her eye, she registered Mama Murphy’s house on fire as Mary ran towards where the most screaming was taking place: the infirmary. She saw a couple of other Minutemen trading fire in the street with the raiders out front of it. One of them went down, screaming as he clutched the bullet wound in his hip, as Mary ran past him to mince both the tree the raider who’d hit him hid behind and the raider himself. A bullet slammed into her chest piece, sending Mary stumbling backwards several steps. By the time she found her feet, Mary saw her attacker, a raider woman with a hunting rifle, writhing and wailing on the ground in unimaginable agony in front of the infirmary’s door, clutching a burn that had charred away half the flesh on her skull. Another laser musket blast shut her up, though she continued squirming, the screams traded for chokes and coughs. 

 

By the time she had dragged herself across the street, Mary saw the Minuteman who’d killed the raider that shot her sliding up alongside her. Mary threw open the door and unleashed hell in several bursts, starting with pulping the torso of the man who’d impaled Curie through the shoulder with a switchblade and was fighting to get her pants off, followed by tearing the top half of the head off of the woman repeatedly stabbing a squirming, bleeding, squealing child in a sickbed, and ending with tearing through the leg and lower torso of a raider hacking the arm off of an old man whose punches and screams went unfelt and unheard. What stopped her was one of the last two raiders in the room taking a shot with a homemade pistol that glanced off the edge of her shoulder piece and lodged deep in the muscle of her deltoid. 

 

Mary almost fell over from the shock of the pain, the pain and force driving her back on her feet. The Minuteman who’d accompanied her took a shot, though Mary couldn’t see if it found its mark or not. With a roar, she threw herself back into the room, and filled with lead the chest cavities of both the raider in the corner and the bruised and bloodied young man he was using as a human shield. Mary had no time to process what she’d done, turning to the raider who’d shot her, but finding him flailing on the floor, adding his screams to the others’ as he fought with his flaming shirt. The flames were dying as the Minuteman put another beam of light into him, burning a hole through his skull. 

 

“Curie!” Mary screamed, over the ringing in her ears, at the woman stimming her own shoulder while holding the bloody dagger that had been in it in a shaking hand. She turned to Mary, blinking rapidly, a little bile on her chin. “Dish out stims! Grab their guns and protect the infirmary! I’m going back out there!”

 

The synth woman dropped the dagger, nodding as she rose to her feet and set to work.

 

*****

 

Standing up on the north turret of Fort Independence, Cait glanced at Jon in his chair and turned her gaze back northward, towards Saugus Ironworks on the horizon. “You know these Minutemen better’n I do, Jon. D’you think they’ll kick those Gunners into the sea?”

 

“Well, I certainly hope so. How’s your hangover?”

 

“It’s not a hangover, it’s bloody murder is what it is,” Cait said. Even as the sun had begun to set and the day dim, the light made her head pound with each heartbeat. “I already drank a fuckin’ quart of your canteen or I’d ask for more.” Over the course of the next twenty minutes, the sky turned purple and the sun dipped below the horizon. As the last bits of light faded, Piper said, “Shouldn’t they be back by now? In my experience, battles don’t usually last too long.”

 

“Maybe they wanted to wait until night,” Jon said, “to make it easier to sneak up along the trench. Or, you know. Maybe they’re all dead.”

 

Cait produced a scoffing laugh. “Jon, when someone asks you that sort of question, you’re supposed to make them feel better, not say they’re all dead.” Even so, the little gnaw of worry in her belly grew stronger. She pulled her rifle from around her shoulder and magnified the scope to the farthest it could go. Despite the capabilities of the scope, she couldn’t tell anything from looking in the direction of Saugus Ironworks; at least, not for a second. She scanned around the area, and caught some movement. Well to the east of the Ironworks, along the coast, she saw people piling bodies. A few of them had revolution era long coats, marking them for Minutemen, and Cait breathed a sigh of relief. “They’re movin’ the dead, Jon. Some of them are bringin’ the Minuteman corpses back here, and the rest are piling up the Gunners to burn. Looks like the Janice and the colonel are with the Minuteman bodies.” Jon didn’t respond for a moment, and Cait lowered her rifle, taking a glance at him, finding him with his elbows on his knees, his mouth pulled taut.

 

“I know it’s stupid. I just - I’m sorry - I had hoped no one would die. Not on our side. It’s just a stupid hope, I know.” He groaned and slumped back in his chair with a smile on his face, an odd one that didn’t make much sense at all.

 

“Damn fuckin’ straight it’s stupid. It’s a war, Jon. You don’t expect anyone to die?”

 

“No, I expected it. Just hoped otherwise.”

 

Cait slung her rifle back over her shoulder and pressed a hand into her pounding temple. “Don’t worry about it. How old are you, fifteen?”

 

Jon knit his brow and put his tongue in his cheek, looking at Cait. “Try twenty three. How old are you, then, forty?”

 

“Nope. Just thirty. Try not to be so naive. I’m gonna go help ‘em out.” Cait started for the stairs.

 

“Send someone up here, will you?”

 

“Afraid you’re on your own with that, Jonny boy!” Cait stepped down the stairs as Jon called half-hearted protests. 

 

*****

 

A nightmare. A fucking nightmare. Ian had hit this woman eight times, put bullets in her twice, but she kept coming, with that buzzing fucking machine gun, blazing through everyone else as he repeatedly pulled back. Finally, he hid in the backyard of a suburb house, and tried the back door, finding it locked. He heard that woman’s pained roars coming around the side of the house, and his heart leapt up through his throat into his ears as he took a step back and kicked the door in, clutching his 10mm in a white knuckled grip. As he bolted towards the front, he heard those barrels spin up, and he threw himself sideways, onto the staircase. That cacophonous blasting started again, splintering apart the staircase as he repeatedly fell up it. 

 

Ducking into a hallway closet, Angie came to his mind. She’d gone into the infirmary, but Zeus commanded Ian press further in with him. A kid had been screaming by the time Ian had pushed out of earshot of the infirmary, and he remembered how kids were Angie’s favorite to play with. 

 

*****

 

Mary stopped as she reached the top of the stairs. Only half the upper floor remained, a bedroom, a bathroom, and the closet between them. All the doors were shut. Blood continued to pour from her wounds, and she knew that she wouldn’t stay conscious much longer without a Stimpak. “Come out with your hands up,” she called, hoarse sounding. Luckily, the ceramic had held enough that none of her vital organs had been damaged. At least, she thought so. “Come out, or I swear to God I’ll shred this entire fucking floor.”

 

As she waited for a response, she swayed on her feet, blinking hard. Blood was running down her sleeve to drip off her wrist. If she hadn’t been wearing gauntlets, then she would have wanted to wipe it off, just from the irritating sensation. The closet door slammed open, but Ian didn’t have his hands up. He squeezed off two shots by the time Mary’s barrels spun up, one missing, one glancing off her helmet, cracking it and dazing her. She stumbled as the weapon fired. At first, the floor took all of the bullets, and she dragged the weapon upwards, towards the raider. Another bullet hit her, dead center of her chest, and the bullets from the minigun sprayed wide for a moment before she tugged it over to the left, and blood sprayed forth from the raider’s chest, his leather jacket turning into a rag. 

 

He coughed and gasped on the floor, choking, struggling for air as blood clogged his airways. Mary’s minigun had gone dry as she killed him, and she dropped it, shrugging off the pack that had held the ammunition belt at the same time. As she slumped against the wall, she looked down at herself. The ceramic breastplate had cracked in several places, and she felt like she’d been, well, shot. With a groan of pain, she undid the buckles that held it in place and let it fall to the floor, into several pieces as the fasteners came loose. With a shaking and bloody hand, she prodded at her chest and belly. 

 

Nothing worse than a few bruises affected her across her chest and stomach, but she could tell without touching them that she had four bullet wounds, two in her right shoulder, one in her left, and the last through her right deltoid. She sighed and let her head fall backwards. If not for the wounds in her shoulders, she would undo her helmet. As it was, she endured the pain from the helmet being shot. With her next inhalation, she groaned in disappointment, smelling that the raider had evacuated his bowels. Her vision started to fade, and she did like her mother had told her to when she wanted to faint from hunger, she flexed her abdomen, force some of the blood back to her brain. She unbuckled the helmet and let it fall off of her as her consciousness started to feel a little more sure. 

 

“Fucking Christ.” A nightmare. A fucking nightmare.

 

*****

 

When Cait returned to the Castle, helping Janice carry an injured man on a stretcher, they found people waiting for them outside the northwest gate. From a hundred yards away, Janice said, “That’s Brotherhood of Steel. The people in the Power Armor, they’re Brotherhood.” They passed off the groaning man with a few nasty burns from laser weaponry to a couple of Minutemen that were injured by able-bodied enough to carry a slip of a man that couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and thirty pounds. 

 

Cait dug the heel of her palm into her temple, the headache beginning to abate, as they stepped out ahead of the other Minutemen. “Ya don’t suppose that’s Dancer over there, do you?”

 

“Could be. It’d make sense, too, since Danse knows people in the Commonwealth.”

 

Cait muttered agreement. When they came close enough to see faces, if faces had been on display, one of the three Brotherhood soldiers in Power Armor called out to them. “That’s close enough.” Cait could at least tell the voice was male. The pounding between her ears kept her from really understanding if it was Danse or not. She and Janice both stopped. “We’re here on behalf of the Brotherhood of Steel. Can you direct us to the leader of the Minutemen? One of your comrades on the gate informed me that this establishment belongs to them.”

 

Janice lifted a hand. “General Janice Racker, good to meet you. What do you want?”

 

A moment of silence passed. “You’re the general? Really? That’s, er, quite convenient.”

 

“Yes, it is. What do you want?”

 

Another moment of silence. Something told Cait that the speaker didn’t really believe Janice was the general of the Minutemen. “Well, elder Arthur Maxson would like to know why the Minutemen are conducting operations so close to Boston Airport.”

 

“Retaliation. The Gunners have slaughtered too many Minutemen; we’re fighting back. We just wiped one of their outposts off the face of the planet. If anything, Maxson should thank me for getting rid of a headache for him to deal with.” Janice folded her arms, and Cait put a hand on her hip, more or less unknowingly accentuating Janice’s movement.

 

“The elder would also like to inform you that you ought to cease operations within a ten block radius of Boston Airport. If you don’t, it would be too easily viewed as a provocation and we would like to avoid any and all unpleasantness concerning the Minutemen.”

 

“Fantastic. Now, can you move so we can get to tending to our injured and burying our dead?” Janice’s voice sounded like clenched teeth. 

 

“Of course.” The man in the Power Armor at the front of the trio turned to the others and said, “Let’s move out. There’s nothing else for us here right now.”

 

As the Brotherhood soldiers tromped off and the injured and dead started pouring through the gates into the courtyard of Fort Independence, Cait turned to Janice. “Is it just me, or did they look to be expecting a fight?”

 

“That’s how the military is, Cait,” Janice said, starting for the Castle. “We’re always ready for a fight.”


	15. Two Days

Something like an hour passed before Mary heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Her eyes drifted to the 10mm pistol beside the corpse of the raider man across the room. She leaned forward, but couldn’t find the strength to get to her feet and cross the room to grab the pistol. When the short, black haired head of Curie popped up around the corner of the staircase, though, Mary sagged back against the wall and breathed a sigh of relief. 

 

The synth woman had a medical bag in her hand, and knelt beside Mary, her face solemn. As she dug through the bag, she said in her affected french accent, “I heard a mighty warrior had come into this house, but hadn’t come back. It is said by the survivors that she saved Sanctuary.”

 

Mary shook her head as Curie undid the buttons on Mary’s shirt, and spoke as she slid the shoulders aside to get a look at her wounds. “I might’ve saved Sanctuary. I didn’t save enough, er, something, fuck, can you just jab me with some morphine already?”

 

“Poor Mary,” Curie said, but pulled out a syringe of Med-X brand morphine from her bag. “Relax your shoulder,” she said, and wiped away the blood on one of her shoulders. Mary did her best to relax, but still winced as the needle slipped into her. Then she sighed as the opioid started flooding her bloodstream. “You did good work. Now, please, try to relax as I pull out the bullets.”

 

“Yes, ma’am. Did you manage to shoot anyone?” Whether or not the morphine had already affected her, Mary felt out of sorts mentally already. 

 

“Several people, if you count Stimpaks. With the gun, though? Only one. Believe it or not, I’m actually a pretty good shot.” Curie finally managed to pull out some sterilized narrow tongs. “I spent quite a while with Janice out on the road, helping people, stitching them up out in the Wasteland. I spent so long here I forgot what it’s like out there.”

 

Despite the numbing effect of the morphine, Mary still felt odd, watching Curie dig around inside of her shoulder and pull out a mangled, bloody chunk of lead. “I would very much like to forget about it, too, Curie. Thanks for helping me.”

 

“I can’t help you as much as I would like. There are many other people that require attention, and I cannot stitch you up, though a Stimpak ought to keep the wounds closed if you don’t move around too much.” Curie pulled out the second one from Mary’s right shoulder, and switched to the other side.

 

“I appreciate it anyway. Now, I’m gonna take a nap.” Even as she said this, Mary felt herself slipping out of consciousness.

 

“You go right ahead.”

 

*****

 

“What I wouldn’t give for a nap,” Janice grumbled to Cait as they slipped through the alleys of Boston. “Yesterday was exhausting.”

 

“I understand the sentiment. Hush up, now. I think I hear some raiders.” As they approached the mouth of the alley, they stopped, listening to the chattering raiders as they strolled up the street, thankfully, this time, away from them. They darted across the street towards another alleyway, Cait holding the bag she’d taken from the Castle in the not pumping hand. “We can stop in Diamond City before we go to Vault 95, if you want. I’ve survived this long without a miracle cure, I can go a while longer.”

 

Janice sighed and sank down into a corner of the alley. “Fuck, I’m tired. Can we get out of this war zone already, Cait? Boston tires me out like nothing else.”

 

A perverted red eyebrow quirked on Cait’s face. “Oh, nothin’ else? Am I going’ to have to work harder next time we’re alone?”

 

Those relatively pearly teeth showed themselves in a weak grin. “I’d usually never say no to that. Come on, though. Now’s not the time to be discussing this.” 

 

“What if I find you a nice, quiet rooftop?”

 

“No, Cait. Let’s go.”

 

The two of them continued westward through the streets of Boston, fighting through a few raiders at one point, but for the most part avoiding physical confrontations pretty well. In her head, Cait rather wished that they’d gotten in more fights as they approached Diamond City’s entrance from the northeast. Janice was so efficient in battle. A machine. And, sometimes, when Cait saw Janice soaked in other people’s blood, she went a little weak in the knees. She wondered why she thought herself so different from those raiders. 

 

Over the next day, Cait and Janice picked their way across the Commonwealth, heading southwest and skillfully avoiding the majority of potential combat situations that presented themselves. The trip took a while, but if Boston weren’t so dense in its evils, then it would have been much shorter. After they stepped out of the city limits, Cait felt as though she could breathe, the claustrophobic streets and alleyways giving way only to vicious Super Mutants and raiders in Boston. 

 

Vault 95 had been situated into a hillside, the scaffolding leading up to a massive, solid steel door in the shape of a gear. The door laid open. Cait saw all this from the cover of some what little foliage the Commonwealth had to offer, also noting each of the Gunners she saw through her scope as she scanned the entrance.

 

“How many are there?” Janice asked, laying on her belly beside the crouching Cait.

 

“I’m seein’ four. Could be more, though.”

 

A moment’s silence passed as Cait continued scanning, for once wanting to check something out before throwing herself into it. Janice broke the silence. “It’s getting late. They’ll have the upper hand in the dark. Are we pulling out or are we going in?”

 

“Fuck it.” Cait, crosshairs over the head of a man a hundred yards away, in the best maintained armor of any of them, pulled the trigger. He collapsed to his side, a spray of pink mist appearing where he’d been sitting, and Cait brought her rifle down from where it’d jumped with the shot to draw a bead on and blast away the woman he’d been talking to. Janice sent one of them, screaming, to the ground as he beat at the flames rapidly spreading across his entire body. Cait saw the fourth just as he ran around the corner of the gear shaped door, right into the Vault. “Fuckin’ shite. Number four is going to go grab his pals. How do you want to play this?”

 

“It’s getting dark,” Janice said. “Now that we’re the only ones outside, we’ll have the advantage. I’ll get out my .44 so they can’t pinpoint our locations so easily. And we’ll have to keep moving between shots as they come out of the Vault, so that they won’t be able to guess where the next shot is coming from. Let’s go get set up, opposite sides of the Vault door.”

 

Cait took the side that they were already on, Janice able to move with the shadows more effectively. The entrance of the Vault was illuminated like day, which played to their advantage. While she laid on her belly at an elevated position more than a hundred yards away, Janice had taken a spot less than fifty yards from the light, as Janice did not have a magnified scope. Of course, the Gunners were no fools. The first person they sent out was a young man in light clothing, who came out at a dead sprint. Cait’s shot missed, but Janice sent him skidding to a halt on his face, a gaping hole through his neck. 

 

Three of them charged out at once, and met the wounds that would spell their ends within ten seconds of setting out. Their plan worked, and Cait moved from spot to spot as she took out the Gunners with Janice. Some of them managed to get past the lights, but didn’t last more than a half a minute past that. Over the ten minutes that passed since the first man charged out, they laid out twenty people on the ground, dead or dying. Some of them had managed to get shots off at them, but none found their mark. 

 

Cait met Janice by the entrance to the Vault. Janice gave her a worried look. “You ready for this, Cait?”

 

“You fuckin’ know it.”

 

*****

 

A knock came on Red Tourette’s door. She wiped the giddy grin off her face with the back of her hand, thinking, all right, angst, fire, death, anger, you got this. As she stood up, those giggles threatened to burst out of her mouth, but she literally bit them back, almost spilling blood from biting her tongue so hard. After donning her malformed mask, she pulled open the door, finding the frightened, slight form of Ernum before her. “Miss Tourette. I have, um, I have news about the attack on Sanctuary.”

 

“Spill it to me. I don’t usually kill messengers, and your face says it went wrong.”

 

“I-it went wrong.” Ernum cowered before her, expecting a hit that didn’t come. “Um, that is, most of the people we sent died. There was a woman, with a minigun, and some fancy-fuck armor, at least that’s what the survivors called it. Norm got up to her with a machete, but she just shoved him back and turned him into pulp. That’s the closest anyone got. Still, we did a lot of damage. If we sent another party-”

 

“How many dead? On our side.”

 

“O-oh. Sixteen.”

 

Red Tourette ground her teeth behind her mask. “And on theirs?”

 

“It’s unclear. Best I can figure, between twelve and twenty.”

 

“Thank you, Ernum. Go, make sure that our people are on guard. We’re going to have to be on guard from now on; they could retaliate at any time.” Tourette saw him nod confirmation, and shut her door in his face when he made to respond. Then she pulled open the door again, finding Ernum starting to walk away. “Wait. How many prisoners did we collect?”

 

“J-just two. The others are, em, entertaining them, that’s what they said.”

 

“Get everyone down by the front. And make sure they bring the prisoners. I’ll be down there in about an hour.” Red Tourette shut the door, with a finality it didn’t have last time. She sagged back onto the couch. Then she remembered how those Gunners at Mass Pike Interchange were all dead in a pile of rubble, and she giggled for a moment. Just a moment.

 

*****

 

As Cait kicked aside an ancient skeleton, she paused and said, “Hey, Janice. C’mere a second.”

 

Her friend, who’d been looting the corpses of the Gunners they’d slaughtered but moments before, crossed the room to where Cait stood. “What’s up?”

 

Cait pointed at the skeleton wearing the partially shredded Vault 95 jumpsuit. “He’s got one of them pit boys or whatever. You used to have one. Ever miss it?”

 

As a response, Janice bent over and yanked the Pip-Boy off of the forearm of the dead person. “Hell fucking yes. Made everything so damned convenient. Did you know that these things have a radio receiver?” Even as she said this, Janice put the Pip-Boy on, rolling up the sleeve of her flannel shirt. “Diamond City or classical radio?”

 

“Diamond City. It’s been too long since I’ve heard Travis’s shakin’-in-his-boots voice.”

 

“Agreed.” 

 

As the radio’s connection crackled into existence, the timid, middling voice of Travis filled the Vault air. “...man operation against the Gunners at, um, the Auto Wreckers, at, at Hub City, yeah, was a booming success. Hehe. Booming, y’know like…? Anyway, a mini nuke explosion leveled Mass Pike Interchange, killed around th-thirty, whoa, thirty? Thirty Gunners, and Red Tourette’s gang claimed responsibility. That’s, uh, that’s the news for now, so have some Billie Holiday, I guess.” 

 

Cait took a seat at a table next to a dead man she’d shot, whose head was leaking gore into a bowl of watery porridge. “Fuckin’ love Billie Holiday. Few years ago, I found this holotape full of a bunch o’ her songs. I’d use the terminal in the Combat Zone as much as possible to listen to it.”

 

“What happened to it?”

 

“Forgot to take it out of my pocket before a fight once. Course, the one time I forgot, it got smashed. I made a good show that night with the fucker that did it. Didn’t just do the head smashing bit that I did when you swept the place clean.” She looked up, grinning at Janice, but at Janice’s stormy, pensive expression, her grin faded. “What’s wrong, Janice? Don’t tell me that this is gonna be the thing that convinces you to hate me as much as I do.”

 

“I’m not going to hate you, Cait,” Janice said.

 

As she said this, the Billie Holiday song on the Pip-Boy’s radio crooned, “‘’Cause I’m craaaazy, crazy in love,” before Janice finally found the radio knob to turn it off.

 

Janice’s face went red, looking pointedly at Janice’s boots, and Cait’s face went slack. “What a fuckin’ coincidence. C’mon. Let’s go find this miracle cure or whatever.” She rose to her feet, and Janice nodded

 

*****

 

This time, with this many dead, they didn’t dig graves. Mary, back up on the hill, sitting in the grass, watched the piles of bodies burn over at the Red Rocket gas station less than a half a mile away. Pungent odors filled her nose, of smoke and burning flesh. With the Stimpak taxing on her body, her stomach growled, and she never knew that those dead people could smell so good. She watched from the hill with a couple several yards to her right, the couple holding each other close, tight. After the fires started, nobody was allowed out of the gate. They all knew that whatever gang attacked them, there would be more, and they could attack again at any moment, but this time, this time they would be ready.

 

Her fingernails dug into the varnish on the submachine gun that Sturges had prepared, which sat on her lap. After a half hour, she started descending the hill back towards Sanctuary. Sobbing people filled the streets, in presence if not in physicality. Their wails echoed through the thin shack walls they hid behind, and as Mary walked the streets of the ancient suburb, she couldn’t help but compare this to the stories of Hell, of the damned and their screams, that her parents had filled her childhood with. They’d named her for the famed virgin of the Bible, the perfect woman that God decided deserved to carry his child more than anyone else. They’d hoped that it would help convince her to be good, to do right and go to heaven. It was a futile effort in Mary’s eyes. The Wasteland was filled with monsters, and her father cursed the Super Mutants themselves for demons, claiming they clawed their way out of Hell. Mary thought differently. She thought that the Super Mutants were angry because the humans were invading their territory, their Hell.

 

When Mary approached the infirmary, she could hear the sobs inside from the street, and she suddenly felt hesitant to go inside, hand on the doorknob, but unmoving. Somehow, she knew, that if she entered the building, she’d join the sobbing masses. It still felt like a nightmare, but looking at the injured would turn it into a reality. Sturges was in there. He’d caught a couple of stray bullets, and Curie had run out of her Stimpaks by the time she got to him. Mary pulled back away from the door. 

 

She continued walking the streets, letting this be an out of body experience as she conducted her own form of mourning. Not consciously did she walk the streets, her legs seeming to move of their own accord. She didn’t control which streets she walked down. No, she didn’t even have a whim or a desire. Her mind was empty. Her gun hung limp in a hand with barely enough strength to hold it, and suddenly the thought came to her that she deserved this. The raider with the human shield. One of them tried to yield to her another time, and she buzzed his head into pulp the same as the others. Little better than the murderers and rapists that had ravaged the settlement. She was no Mary. At best, she was a Jezebel. Eager to seize power, to use it, and disregarding the consequences. Because she seized and used that power, Marcy Long died, the man whose name she’d never even bothered to learn, so many people. She looked up to the stars, stopping, and willed them to fall on her. To give her what she deserved.

 

Nothing. Just the pained screams of the victims. She wondered how long it’d be before Jun Long killed her in her sleep.

 

*****

 

Looking into the room with the chair, Cait couldn’t help but feel panic rise in the pit of her gut. Straps to hold her in place, needles to do God knows what. Fear seized her, and she turned to Janice, eyes wide with it, and said, “Y’know, the answer to all my problems is sittin’ right there in that room, but I dunno if I should go through with it.”

 

“We’ve come so far already, Cait. Let’s just get it done with.”

 

Cait sighed, putting a hand on her hip. “Look, I know you risked yer life an’ all gettin’ me down here, but what if the Psycho’s the only thing keepin’ me together?” Janice scoffed, but Cait shook her head, continuing. “What if this opens my eyes and I don’t like what I see? There were reasons I dulled the pain, things I didn’t wanna face, things I wanted to forget. I’d rather be spittin’ blood than reliving the past.”

 

“We’ll face that pain together, Cait. I’m here for you.” Janice wrapped hands around Cait’s shoulders, but Cait pulled back out of them. 

 

Rubbing the heel of her palm at her own forehead, Cait paced and said, “Y’know, you’ve already done so much, to keep wanting to do more. Who the hell would I be to look a gift horse in the mouth, anyway? I’m gonna go sit in the chair. When you’re ready, throw the switch, get it started.” 

 

Janice gave her a smile. “I’ll protect you if I have to, Cait. Know that I’m here for you, and I care about you. Good luck.” As Cait turned back to the door and opened it, Janice patted her behind, and Cait smirked a little as she stepped into the perhaps deliberately ominous chamber. A padded chair sat in the center of the fifteen by fifteen by ten foot room, and as she walked in, she saw the machinery stretching out into the wall behind it. She suddenly wished she had one last hit of Jet, but her pockets were empty. She took the rifle from over her shoulder and laid it up against the metal wall, flashing Janice a smile before sitting down in the chair. Just when she felt comfortable in the ergonomic chair, padded steel cuffs closed around her wrists and ankles. Several seconds passed, she was just beginning to calm down, and then the needles appeared. 

 

Just out of the corner of her eyes, she could see them on either side of her neck. They slipped into the flesh of her neck, that cold, pointed pressure, and she squeezed her eyes shut. It almost didn’t hurt, but then the fire started pouring into her. Her fingers clenched the end of the armrests, the tendons in her arms and her knuckles popping as she ground her teeth and groaned between them. Her eyes alternated between almost popping out of her head and being squeezed shut tighter than a high security prison cell. The fire pouring into her turned cold, seeming to freeze her from the inside out, filtering inexorably through her body, towards her toes, out towards her skin, in to soak her bones. 

 

The tortuous, cleaning sensations continued, feeling as though she’d eaten an entire box of Abraxo cleaner for several minutes. She could feel whatever this injection was make progress, not just working its way through her, but cleaning out her system, scrubbing her blood vessels with a wire brush. Little mewls leaked out of her mouth as she squirmed, just slightly, her fingers clenching and unclenching repeatedly. She didn’t notice the mewls, though. She only noticed how the sensation was growing steadily less unbearable. When it felt not painful, but still uncomfortable, like a vaccine, that’s when the needles withdrew. After they did, she didn’t even feel the dull pain of a typical needle prick, and when the restraints allowed her shaking hands to reach up and prod at her neck, they came away dry.

 

When she stood up, she almost fell over, but not because she felt woozy or drunk. Rather, for the first time she could remember, she didn’t have cottonmouth or that nagging nausea she got when she wasn’t high on Jet or Psycho, and as she stumbled towards the door, her head didn’t have the pounding, yet dull headache that it always had when she was sober. Janice pushed through the door, and pulled Cait in for a quick hug, which Cait shoved back from, palming her face. “Are you alright, Cait? How are you feeling?”

 

“Strange.” She leaned her back against the steel wall, and pressed her hand into her face again, unused to Janice’s voice not coming out to her in an odd echo. “I feel really strange. Everythin’ is different, clearer.” Her voice came out slow, paced, like Mama Murphy if she had an Irish accent. “Colors, sounds, smells. Nothin’ is like I remember. I, I can’t believe it worked, the cravings, the pain, hell, even the rush, they’ve disappeared.” Pushing herself back to her feet, she scoffed, but not at anything in particular. “Was I really that far gone?”

 

Janice let out a relieved sigh. “I’m just glad you’re alright. I was worried about you.”

 

“Heh. You’re just adorable when you’re scared.” The sarcastic comment meant that they shared a nervous laugh. “You weren’t the only one, though. I care about your opinions an’ all, but if I didn’t want to do it, I wouldn’t have.”  
That thin lipped smile shone in Janice’s face, and she pressed her lips to Cait’s for a heartbeat. “Now don’t you get started with that shit again. I’m not taking you to Goodneighbor for a year, got it?”

 

Cait grinned. “You’re not the fuckin’ boss o’ me, Janice. I ain’t goin’ to be gettin’ back on the shit, sure, but you’re not my mother. I might be fucked in the head, but I’m not that bloody kinky.” That drew another mutual laugh. “Thanks. For this.”

 

“Anytime. Preferably never again, but anytime.”

 

“Never again. Absolutely not. That was shitty.” 

 

“You got it.”

 

*****

 

Red Tourette stood in front of the two kneeling men, mask on, her fingers drumming on the handle of her knife in its sheath. Both men were clean shaven, but the cleanliness stopped there. Their faces had been beaten and bruised, neither of them with more than one eye not swollen shut. The man on the left was missing a couple of fingernails, and both of them wore dirty, bleeding feet in place of shoes. Their hands had been bound behind their backs, and they were made to kneel, but one of them knelt on his right leg, his left stretched straight out to the side to keep the broken bone within from complaining too much. Tears had wiped away some of the dirt and blood on both man’s face, but only the man with the healthy legs looked up into Red’s eyes behind her mask. The other watched her feet. 

 

She looked around to the eighty or so people gathered around, the little bit of quiet chatter in the crowd turning to silence as she raised her hands above her head. “Listen up, assholes! These two have shamed themselves, showing themselves to be weak, undeserving of life, by abandoning their home and families and allowing themselves to be captured. Yet, you know me to be a fair woman.” She pointed to the man with the broken leg. “This man has been injured, so we will pit him against the weakest of us. The least honorable, the most pitiable. Channy! Get the fuck over here!”

 

Some people in the crowd shifted to the side, but most of them had to be shouldered past by the jittery woman picking her way through the crowd. The area around her mouth had been devoid of skin, as she had been chewing through it and picking at it relentlessly. She wore stained and soiled rags that didn’t properly fit her. “Channy, you’re a junkie bitch. You’re going to fight this broken leg asshole, and whoever is alive at the end of it gets to stay alive in my gang, if you’re strong enough not to be killed by the Jet jitters or him by his injuries.”

 

“Y-you got it, Miss Tourette,” Channy said, chewing on the skin around her fingernails. As she spoke, Tourette marched around behind the man on his knee. “W-what are we gonna fight with?” 

 

Red Tourette unlocked his handcuffs and said, “Your hands, right here, right now. Get to it!” 

 

Channy didn’t hesitate. She threw herself at the injured man, wrapping her hands around his throat as he let out a whimper of pain. He fell on his back and she kneeled on his chest, and he scratched at her hands, drawing deep furrows of blood. As they fought, Tourette dragged the other man to the side by his handcuffs, him giving muted protests at the discomfort of the action. “Now, then. This fuck’s able bodied, so I’m going to give him a thrashing.” A couple of laughs and jeers went up in the audience. 

 

When she unlocked his handcuffs, the man immediately threw himself at her, trying to tackle her, but only succeeding in stealing her knife as she threw him to the side, using his momentum against him. Ten feet apart, Tourette stood with her fists raised, and said, “Come at me, little man!” The man’s one open eye spoke hatred as he glared at her, and he charged her with abandon. His first swipe missed as Tourette danced back out of his reach, ripping off her iron mask in the same motion. When he tried again, giving a grunt of effort, his grunt turned into a pained cry as she slammed her mask into his wrist, prompting him to drop the knife. He tried to bring his other fist around, but Tourette smacked his hand aside with her mask again, tearing another cry from his throat. When she smashed a dent into his skull, he fell backwards onto his ass, lifting up his bloodied, broken hand between her and him in a last ditch effort to protect himself. Red Tourette took her time in donning her mask again, and stooped to pick up her knife. 

 

She fell on him like a beast, driving the knife into his chest and gut repeatedly. As his screams turned to choking, pained gurgles, she soaked in the sound, in the anguish she knew herself to be responsible for; she soaked in the power. When, at last, his gurgles stopped, Tourette’s forearm was coated in browning blood, and pieces of his internal organs had slipped out, pushing up against his shirt. She hadn’t even noticed the crowd’s cheers and jeers, and when she rose to her feet, lifting the knife high, the cheers grew into a roar.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know how long this will be. I'll try to get updates at least biweekly, but it's gonna be erratic. Sometimes you'll get several a day, sometimes one or two over the course of several weeks. Also, it might get a bit winding, and I can't predict where the story is gonna end up, except that it will loosely follow the main storyline of Fallout 4 and some subplot lines.


End file.
